What Is Taboola?

Taboola is the advertising company behind those "Recommended for You" boxes under news articles. It is not a virus, not something you installed, and it reaches around 600 million people a day. Here is how it works, who pays whom, and why people complain about it.

Taboola is an advertising technology company whose software puts those "Recommended for You" and "You May Also Like" boxes at the bottom of news articles. Some of the links in those boxes are other articles from the same site. Others are paid advertisements. Taboola sells the paid ones, splits the money with the publisher, and reaches around 600 million people every day doing it.

If you arrived here because you spotted the name under an article and wondered what it was, the short version is: it is not a virus, it is not tracking software you accidentally installed, and it is on the page because the publisher put it there deliberately. The longer version — including how it works, who pays whom, and the criticism it attracts — is below.

Taboola at a glance

What is Taboola.com?

Taboola.com is simply the company's website — the corporate home page where publishers and advertisers sign up. It is not a tracker, not an app, and not something that installs itself on your device.

People usually search what is taboola com for one of three reasons:

• They saw the name under an article. The recommendation box carries a small "by Taboola" label, which is exactly what it is meant to do — disclose who served the ads.
• The domain appeared in their browser. Clicking a sponsored link routes briefly through a Taboola tracking URL before landing on the advertiser's page. That flash in the address bar is normal redirect behaviour, not a hijack.
• They saw it in browser network activity or an ad blocker log. Taboola's scripts load on pages that use it, like any ad technology.

One point of possible confusion: the advertising platform itself now lives at a separate address, realize.com. Taboola renamed its advertiser product Realize in February 2025, so taboola.com is the company and Realize is the tool advertisers actually log into.

What is Taboola.com used for?

The honest answer to what is taboola com used for depends entirely on which side of the transaction you are on. Three groups use it for three different things.

That last row matters. Readers are not customers here; their attention is the product being sold. That is true of nearly all ad-funded media, but it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

How Taboola actually works

Adam Singolda described his original idea as a "search engine in reverse". A search engine waits for you to type what you want. Taboola tries to work out what you might want next and put it in front of you without being asked.

The mechanics, in order:

1. A publisher installs a snippet of code on their article pages, reserving a slot for the recommendation widget.
2. You load an article. The widget requests content to fill the slot.
3. Taboola's system decides what to show — a blend of the publisher's own articles and paid placements, chosen by predicted likelihood of a click based on the page, your device, your location and previous behaviour on the network.
4. You click a sponsored item. The advertiser is charged, typically per click.
5. The money is split. The publisher takes a share; Taboola keeps the rest.

That revenue split is the whole business. Taboola expected to pay more than $1.5 billion to publishers and device makers in 2025 — money that funds a considerable amount of the journalism you read free.

The "sponsored" label

Paid items carry a label — "Sponsored", "Promoted", or the advertiser's brand name. It is deliberately small, which is a fair criticism, but it is there. If a recommendation shows a brand name under the headline, it is an advertisement rather than an article from the site you are reading.

Where you see Taboola

The network is large and concentrated in news and content publishing. Taboola has named partners including Yahoo, NBC News, CNBC, the BBC, Business Insider, The Independent and El Mundo, with more recent additions including TIME, USA TODAY Network, Weather Channel Digital, Nexstar and Slate.

Its largest single source of inventory is Yahoo, under a 30-year exclusive native advertising partnership signed in 2023 that covers Yahoo Mail, News, Finance and Sports.

It also appears beyond websites — inside publisher mobile apps and in content feeds built into phones from manufacturers including Samsung and Xiaomi. Our guide to where Taboola advertises covers the full placement list.

What Taboola actually sells

The direction is clear from that list: Taboola is repositioning from "content recommendation company" to performance advertising platform, pitching itself as a third channel alongside Google and Meta.

Using Taboola as an advertiser

If you landed here as a marketer rather than a curious reader, the practical numbers:

Clicks are cheap compared with search or social, but the traffic is cold — nobody clicking a recommendation was looking for your product. That is why campaigns built on a straight sales page usually fail and campaigns built on an advertorial usually do not.

Further reading: what it costs to advertise on Taboola, the real minimum budget, our Realize platform review and the account approval process.

Using Taboola as a publisher

For publishers, Taboola is a way to earn from pages that already have traffic. You add the widget, it fills with a mix of your own articles and paid placements, and you take a share of the advertising revenue.

The trade-off is real and worth weighing. Recommendation widgets have a reputation for low-quality, sensational advertising, and placing one signals something about your site to readers. Publishers who care about that negotiate tighter category controls, or accept less revenue for cleaner inventory.

The criticism, fairly stated

Any honest answer to "what is Taboola" has to include why people dislike it.

The "chumbox" reputation — grids of lurid thumbnails promising shocking results — came from the worst of this category several years ago. Enforcement has tightened since, and the specific constructions that get creatives refused are covered in our guide to why native ads get rejected. But the reputation persists because it was earned.

How to stop seeing Taboola ads

If you are a reader who simply wants them gone:

• Use an ad blocker. Standard blocklists include recommendation widgets, and they will disappear.
• Use the widget's own controls. Many placements have a small menu on each item allowing you to hide it or report it.
• Adjust ad personalisation settings. This changes which ads you see rather than removing them.
• Read in reader mode. Most browsers strip the page down to the article text.

Worth knowing: blocking ads on a site you read regularly removes the revenue that pays for it. Several publishers offer paid subscriptions that remove advertising entirely, which supports the work rather than just hiding it.

Taboola compared with the alternatives

Note that Outbrain — long described as Taboola's direct competitor — no longer exists under that name. It merged with Teads and rebranded, which our guide to Outbrain becoming Teads explains. For a full side-by-side, see Taboola vs Teads vs MGID.

The company behind it

Taboola was founded in 2007 by Adam Singolda, who remains chief executive. It began in Israel as a video recommendation engine and is now headquartered in New York, listed on the Nasdaq under TBLA, with around 2,000 employees across roughly 35 locations.

Revenue reached $1.9 billion in 2025, with 2026 forecasts around $2.04 billion. Second-quarter 2026 revenue was $476.8 million, up 2.4% year on year, with net income of $4.3 million against a loss in the same quarter a year earlier.

The strategic bet is Realize. Launched in February 2025, it already accounts for roughly 60% of revenue and repositions the company from content recommendation toward performance advertising — competing for budgets that would otherwise go to Google and Meta.

So — what is Taboola?

An advertising company that pays publishers to place recommendation boxes on their articles, sells the paid slots inside them to advertisers, and splits the money. It reaches about 600 million people a day, earns nearly $2 billion a year, and funds a meaningful share of free online journalism.

For readers, it is advertising you did not ask for, disclosed in small type, easy to block if you want it gone. For advertisers, it is cheap traffic with no purchase intent, which works only with the right funnel behind it. Both things are true at once, and most writing about Taboola picks one and ignores the other.

Sources worth checking directly: the company profile on Wikipedia and Taboola's own publisher announcements.

Company figures are drawn from Taboola's published results and reporting current to September 2026. Advertising costs are typical ranges, not quotes — Taboola does not publish official CPC benchmarks.