Taboola and Outbrain, two Israel-based content recommendation companies, have agreed a merger, it was announced today. The deal will see Taboola pay $250 million in cash in order to acquire Outbrain, which will then hold 30 percent equity in the combined entity. The move brings together the world’s two largest content recommendation businesses, which both specialise in promoting external (as well as internal) content alongside publishers’ own articles.
The new company will operate under the Taboola brand, with Taboola’s CEO Adam Singolda set to continue as CEO of the combined company and Outbrain co-founder and co-CEO Yaron Galai agreeing to stay on for at least 12 months after the deal closes. The deal, reported by Israeli tech news outlet Calcalist and confirmed by Galai on Twitter, will be subject to regulatory approval.
Thanks Hillel! Appreciate the kind words – we’re all very excited about taking two unicorns from Israel to the next level together.
— Yaron Galai (@YaronGalai) October 3, 2019
It has been reported for several years that a merger between the two has been in the works, and the deal makes sense given the similarity of the two businesses. By combining, the two will have extensive reach across Western publishers. Taboola’s partners include Bloomberg, NBC, MSN, Business Insider and ESI Media, while Outbrain counts The Guardian, the BBC, The Washington Post and CNN among its own partners.
Independently, Taboola and Outbrain are both large and well established businesses – business insights specialist Crunchbase reports that both bring in annual revenues of around $900 million, and both are valued at between $1 billion to $10 billion. Combined, the two will be better able to compete with the advertising giants of Google and Facebook. Singolda has previously compared Taboola’s proposition to Facebook’s, in how both provide continuous feeds of content for consumer’s, and the extra scale provided by Outbrain will bolster Taboola’s proposition.
