[alibrarydweller]

In case it's not obvious, Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data.

If a browser goes to ten sites which have Taboola boxes on them, then Taboola can sell the history of that cookie and its browsing history to a targeting company. If the targeting company has a cookie of its own in the same place as a chumbox then the company is able to map everything Taboola knows to everything they know.

Given the efforts of Apple, Google and Mozilla to choke off this type of tech (third party cookie tracking) it's interesting their valuation is this high. I guess they can still make much of counting anonymous visits and mapping them back to IPs for sale.

[lopatin]

Not that they don't do this but I'm not sure selling data is their main source of money. I think their ad placements are actually that valuable. Click-bait sells extremely well when it's manipulative enough and displayed to a wealthy demographic. About 10 years ago you would pay $.1 to $1 for a click from a soccer mom on Fox News. That's not search ads, that $1 per non-targeted display ad click. Which was insane back then, not sure now. I've also not touched ads for a decade so maybe I'm just behind the times.

Edit: I actually credit Taboola and Outbrain with being the enablers of actual "fake news". There was a time when you could make a landing page that looks like the NYT, put an "advertisement" disclaimer in gray letters and 9pt font somewhere, and blast it on Taboola so people buy your supplements. Taboola was fully aware, just loved the money too much.

[namdnay]

> Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data

Where did you get this from? Have they published the relative revenues?