Digital ad company Taboola is set to begin trading Wednesday following its merger with ION Acquisition Corp. 1, a special acquisition corporation.
ION shareholders voted to approve the business combination in a special meeting Monday. The transaction will generate $526 million upon closing, and shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ Wednesday under the ticker “TBLA.”
Taboola places content recommendation boxes on the websites of publishers. Those boxes recommend pieces of content from a publisher’s own site along with promoted slots that advertisers pay for. Taboola makes money when it’s paid by advertisers, and it shares that revenue back with the publisher. The company says more than 13,000 advertisers use its network to reach over 500 million daily active users on the sites of more than 9,000 publishers.
The company said it reported revenue of $303 million and net income of $18.6 million for the first quarter of 2021.
Taboola sees its opportunity in the tens of billions of dollars spent advertising on the “open web,” or on the internet on sites outside of the “walled gardens” of Google or Facebook.
“There’s no Google for the open web, there’s no Facebook for open web, there’s no big company serving publishers on the open web and giving advertisers access to that open web, and Taboola wants to be that company,” founder and CEO Adam Singolda said in an investor presentation earlier this year.