Taboola.com Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 9, 2023

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Welcome to the Taboola Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brinley Johnson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, and good morning, everyone, Welcome to Taboola's 2nd quarter 2023 earnings conference call. I'm here with Adam Singola, Taboola's Founder and CEO and Steve Walker, Tabulos' CFO. The company issued earnings materials today before the market and they are available in the Investors section of Tabulos' website. Now I'll quickly cover the Safe Harbor. Certain statements today, including our expectations for future periods, are forward looking statements.

Speaker 1

They are not facts and are subject to material risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings. These statements are based on currently available information, and we undertake no duty to update them except as required by law. Today's discussion is also subject to the forward looking statement limitations in the earnings press release. Future events could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated. During this call, we will use terms defined in earnings release and refer to non GAAP financial measures.

Speaker 1

For definition and reconciliation to GAAP, please refer to the non GAAP tables in the earnings press release posted on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Adam.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Brinley. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us for our 2nd quarter call. We had a strong performance in Q2, bidding the high end of our guidance across all metrics. We achieved 123 $1,000,000 in ex tax gross profit, dollars 16,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA and $8,000,000 in free cash flow. We're also excited to raise the midpoint of our full year 2023 guidance.

Speaker 2

As we're getting closer to 2024, we're bullish on our future. We expect a step change in our financial performance and we're reiterating our guidance for 2024 of over $200,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA and over $100,000,000 in free cash flow. Our performance in Q2 was driven by a few things. In our core business, publishers all over the world continue to trust us and sign long term partnerships, which we saw with new and competitive wins this quarter from Nextor Media, Barstow Sports, Futura and more. This is on top of key partners like Time, Disney, Unidad editorial, BBC, 1 India, The Print, Bangkok Post renewing their long term relationship with us.

Speaker 2

Publishers are demanding less vendors and more true partners as they chart their growth, diversify their revenue, Empower their editorial teams and battle the never ending changes being thrown at them by the walled garden platforms. You see, being an ad provider is just not good enough, and this is where Teboule is unique, addressing all of those objectives in a win win manner with our publishers. Let me share more about our momentum in Q2. We're outpacing our expectation on e commerce, which now represents nearly 20% of Extech, up from 15% last quarter. I believe e commerce will continue to be a key part of our business as users are looking to make decisions that matter to them based on information from publishers they trust.

Speaker 2

There's a lot of growth for us here where brands are looking for places to spend and bring clients back to their sites. This is not all. We're also outpacing expectations with Taboola News. This is our version of Apple News, which is integrated into Android devices from Samsung, Xiaomi and others. It continues to experience rocket ship growth and will approach $100,000,000 in revenue this year from over $50,000,000 in 2022.

Speaker 2

I love that business because first, we built it organically and it shows that Taboola continues to be a startup of startups, waiting for finding our dreams. And second, this has a high synergy to our core business as publishers are getting a growing volume of traffic from us at a time when generative AI is threatening to limit search traffic for publishers. As I look into the rest of 2023, our focus Continues to be making our 4 company priorities successful Yahoo! Performance advertising, e commerce and bidding, each representing 1,000,000,000 of dollars opportunity for us. Let's take a closer look how each is progressing.

Speaker 2

First, let's talk about Yahoo! As a reminder, we're well underway on executing on our 30 year partnership with Yahoo! Which will see us power recommendations under massive footprint of some of the most iconic publishers in the world, as well as integrating our data to come up with contextual segments advertisers can use and migrating native advertisers to Tableau's technology. We've been developing the technical infrastructure to allow Yahoo! Native advertisers through Taboola's platform as well as Taboola's advertisers on Yahoo!

Speaker 2

You will hear me talk a lot about advertisers' migration, which is an area we're spending a lot of energy on. There is a huge opportunity for both Yahoo! And Taboola here to bring both companies advertisers into the mix, make them even more successful and drive yield expansion over time. Tamyao International Markets are now live with Taboola. This is part of us testing and evaluating advertisers performance in preparation for the U.

Speaker 2

S. Market ramping up in 2024. We expect to go into the next phase with Yahoo! Gradually transitioning ad spend and supply to Taboola in the second half of twenty twenty three. Let's get into our second priority as a company, performance advertising.

Speaker 2

One of the things that is special about Taboola, which is similar to Meta and Google, is that the vast majority of our revenue come from advertisers who buy from Taboola directly using our own AI called SmartBid. About 10% of our revenues come from programmatic partners such as Google, The Trade Desk, Criteo, Amazon and others. Our two main objectives are to get new advertisers to be successful when they try Taboola and get existing advertisers to stay with us and spend more as measured by net dollar retention. Nearly half of our R and D is working on making advertisers successful. We think there's a huge upside for us and the industry by building the very first must buy company enabling advertisers to scale in the open web with Taboola like they do with Google and search and Meta for Social.

Speaker 2

Our engineering team is focused on the tech behind our bidding strategies, which is how we can better help new and existing advertisers succeed even more with us using automated algorithmic based buying methods. I talked in the previous quarter about Target CPA, which allows advertisers to set a goal for how much a conversion such as a lead, a purchase, an app install is worth to them and how Taboola would look for users to meet that threshold. We're progressing further here with a new bidding strategy called maximize conversions. It's the default bidding strategy for companies like Google or Meta, And it allows an advertiser to evolve from placing a CPC price per click and sharing their acquisition goal. Put simply, an advertiser can give Tubular budget And let us try to get as many consumers as we can to convert at the most affordable acquisition price.

Speaker 2

Then once the advertiser sees How many conversions we can get and at what price they can establish a target CPA and scale as much as possible with us. This was tested by dozens of advertisers during the Q2. We've seen encouraging results and I'm excited to share that NEXT conversion as well as Target CPA went to general availability this week. I anticipate that more than 50% of our revenue in 2024 We'll be using maximized conversions, target CPA as a bidding strategy. Imagine a future where advertisers buying from Taboola Don't need to guess a CPC, but rather just share their goal and our AI will do the rest.

Speaker 2

We're not stopping here. Early 2024, we aim to bring to market target ROAS and next revenue bidding strategies that will take into consideration Not only the likelihood for a conversion, but also the expected ROI for the advertiser. And lastly on performance advertising, I'm very excited about our investment in generative AI. I think it will impact many industries and we're deep investing into how it can affect advertisers' success. Brands all over the world have used our technology to generate content and copy for ad creative such as titles and images.

Speaker 2

Now the biggest benefits for them have been reducing their time spent on generating ad creative and producing high performing creative assets for their campaigns. Of the brands using generative AI technology, 80% ran multiple campaigns and we're seeing brands doubling the click through rates when measured against evergreen campaigns. Now let's go into our 3rd priority, e commerce. Our investments into growing our e commerce offerings Via technology and through Connexity and Skimlinx are paying off. I'm happy to report that e commerce is now nearly 20% of our ex TAC And we beat our budget again in the Q2 as we did in Q1.

Speaker 2

We see outstanding merchant retention and increasing budgets validating the value clients get when buying from Taboola. Connexity is also starting to pick up momentum in Europe, which we're very encouraged by. We previously announced the introduction of Taboola Turnkey Commerce, an e commerce in a box solution for publishers, And we've already seen great partners like Time and Advanced Local Media adopted. Taboola is doing all of the work for the publishers here. We're using our data To know which content makes sense for us to write on behalf of the publisher, we're driving traffic to those articles and of course we're monetizing it with relationships with merchants to drive monetization and we're seeing clear signs that it's working.

Speaker 2

A simple Google search for best checking account in 2023 Leads consumers directly to Tabula's turnkey commerce activation on time.com. It's the first organic result. Consumers who search for this phrase are clearly invested in opening a checking account. And when they arrive at time.com page, they can compare options and make a decision. If and when they click on one of Tyme's editorial suggestion, both Tyme and Taboola benefit.

Speaker 2

Our revenue model here is the same as the rest of our business. Every time revenue is being made, we share it with the publisher. Finally, let's review where we are with our bidder. We estimate that the 8,000 plus publishers in our core business generate display revenue of $20,000,000,000 $25,000,000,000 a year. We think that we can access our publishers display inventory with our header bidder solution and win about 5% to 10% of the auction given our advantage in our AI, first party data and technology.

Speaker 2

This will make us even more valuable partners for our publishers, increasing our share of wallet, while providing our advertisers with even more scale. Our strategy here is especially effective As cookies on Chrome are about to be deprecated and based on our experience with Apple ITP, we anticipate this will be a source of strength For our bidder, given our hardcoded integration on publisher sites and access to first party data, we have mainly 2 areas where we bid these days. Microsoft MSN, which launched in April of last year and our publishers where we have first party data advantage. We believe that as Yahoo! Launches, we'll be able to also partner with them on bidding strategy as well.

Speaker 2

We're seeing encouraging signs here as well. Microsoft's Q2 of 2023 was higher than Q2 of 2022 and we expect Microsoft Q3 to be meaningfully bigger than Q3 of 2022. As we said in April last year, we expect its moving to bidding with Microsoft, We helped us design this product initially will make our partnership a growing one and it's happening. In Q2, we doubled down on our efforts and are now live on over 100 sites across our global network of publisher partners. As we continue to scale, we are laser focused on Fine tuning our technology and algorithms, leveraging our ongoing investment in R and D and operations of our bidder platform.

Speaker 2

Now as I read my part, I'm bullish about our future and our position in the industry. We're focused on the right tech investments that will continue to fuel our profitable growth as a company and position us as the very first must buy company in the open web for advertisers and partner of choice for publishers for the next many, many decades to drive revenue, engagement and audience. Personally, I also think Taboola is on the right side of history, driving growth to the open web and journalism in time where advertisers don't have a lot of options Outside of search and social, and none of us wants their kids to discover things that matter like science or health care or politics on TikTok. The open web is critical. We know what we need to do and we're executing on it.

Speaker 2

Thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to interacting with many of you over the next few weeks. I will now pass it over to Steve, our CFO to talk more about our financials.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Adam, and good morning, everyone. As Adam noted, our Q2 results beat the high end of our guidance on all metrics. We are also raising the midpoint of our full year 2023 guidance and reiterating our 2024 expectations of over $200,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA and over $100,000,000 of free cash flow. Let me now talk about our Q2 results, which exceeded the high end of our guidance on all metrics. For Q2, revenues were $332,000,000 versus the midpoint of our guidance of $309,000,000 gross profit of $97,100,000 versus the midpoint of $83,000,000 ex TAC gross profit of $123,100,000 versus the midpoint of $110,000,000 Adjusted EBITDA of $15,700,000 versus the midpoint of $1,000,000 and non GAAP net loss of $6,400,000 versus the midpoint of a loss of $21,000,000 We generated positive free cash flow of 7 $8,000,000 I will note that Q1 and Q2 growth rates suffer from difficult comparables In 2022, before the digital advertising market weakness, we expect to return to positive revenue growth in the second half of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 3

Relative to our guidance, we saw over performance in e commerce, Taboola News and in our bidding offerings. E Commerce continues to impress, taking the momentum of the back half of twenty twenty two through the first half of the year. The U. S. Business has had strong retention and increasing budgets from advertisers or merchants as we tend to call e commerce advertisers.

Speaker 3

In addition, the merchants or advertiser business in Europe has momentum due to our Google PLA campaign management And there are positive supply side drivers with new partnerships in the buy now pay later space. Taboola News will approach 100 dollars in revenues this year versus over $50,000,000 in revenues in 2022. Finally, our bidding offerings continue to gain momentum. Microsoft is expected to have strong double digit ex TAC growth in the second half of twenty twenty three, and we have more than doubled the number of other publishers on which we are now bidding. Our teams have achieved this strong revenue and ex TAC performance while improving cost efficiencies indicated by our adjusted EBITDA margin in Q2 exceeding the margin that was implied by the midpoint of our Q2 guidance.

Speaker 3

Operating expenses were $122,100,000 in the quarter, down $3,900,000 year over year. This decrease was primarily the result of our focus on cost reductions that we announced in Q3 of last year. For the full year, we expect to show lower expenses as a percentage of revenue year over year in 2023. Our headcount is down approximately 8% from its peak in July of 2022. GAAP net loss for the quarter of $31,300,000 included amortization of intangibles of $16,000,000 Share based compensation expenses of $13,900,000 and holdback compensation expenses related to The acquisition of $2,600,000 which were excluded from non GAAP net income.

Speaker 3

Our non GAAP net loss of approximately 1 point $1,000,000 in operating cash flow in Q2 with free cash flow of around $7,800,000 If you remove the impact of net publisher prepayments, which were a source of cash this quarter of $6,900,000 and interest payments on our long term debt, which were a use of cash of $4,700,000 our free cash flow would have been $5,600,000 It is interesting to note that net publisher prepayments were a source of cash this quarter. This was due to the fact that new prepayments were lower than the quarterly amortization of historical prepayments. While we still expect net publisher prepayments to be a use of cash in 2023, it does show how they can become neutral to a source of cash in the future. Q2 has historically been a soft quarter in terms of free cash flow, but in Q2 2023, we benefited from our expenditures that were deferred from Q2 to Q3. Let's turn to the balance sheet.

Speaker 3

Cash and cash equivalents Plus our short term investments decreased from $274,400,000 at the end of Q1 to $246,900,000 at the end of Q2 2023 and remains above our debt principal balance of 203 point $5,000,000 The decrease in our cash and cash equivalents balance was driven by the repayment of $30,000,000 of our long term debt You can see that our net cash balance remains healthy. I also want to update on both the share buyback and debt repayment programs that we announced last quarter. As you probably recall, we announced that we would buy back up to $40,000,000 of shares in 2023 and that we intended to repay up to an additional $50,000,000 of our long term debt in the second half The share buyback program was initiated on June 1 and we repurchased a total of 1,400,000 shares in the month of June at an average price of $3.02 We continued to repurchase shares in Q3 and as of Friday, August 4, we had repurchased a total of approximately 2,900,000 shares at an average share price of $3.17 Note that this includes the shares that we repurchased in June. In addition to the $30,000,000 of our long term debt that we repaid in Q2, our intention remains to repay up to another $50,000,000 of our long debt in 2023, assuming the availability of sufficient working capital.

Speaker 3

In terms of timing, we expect that this will not occur until Q4 due to the need to access certain cash balances in a tax efficient manner. Now let me shift to our forward looking guidance. For the full year 2023, we are raising the midpoint of our guidance. We expect revenues of $1,438,000,000 to $1,469,000,000 gross profit of 420,000,000 to $436,000,000 ex TAC gross profit of $531,000,000 to $546,000,000 Adjusted EBITDA of $73,000,000 to $80,000,000 and non GAAP net income of $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 Adam mentioned earlier that we are now live in some smaller markets with Yahoo! Our full year guidance factors in a Small amount of revenue from Yahoo!

Speaker 3

In those markets. It also factors in the cost of investing in the partnership, so we can capture the full revenue from the partnership. We still expect the revenue to start ramping in the second half of twenty twenty three and to reach full run rate by the middle of 2024. Despite being a year of strategic investment in Yahoo! And in our growth initiatives, we expect to generate positive free cash flow in 2023 for the full year.

Speaker 3

We anticipate free cash flow to turn negative in Q3 due to investments related to the Yahoo! Partnership with significantly positive cash generation in Q4 due to normal seasonality. Finally, we are issuing Q3 guidance. For Q3 2023, we expect revenues to be between $331,000,000 $357,000,000 Gross profit between $83,000,000 $95,000,000 ex TAC gross profit of 112 to $124,000,000 adjusted EBITDA between negative $2,000,000 and positive $10,000,000 and non GAAP net income of negative $20,000,000 to negative $8,000,000 Let me finish by saying that we are happy with our 2nd quarter performance and to be able to raise the midpoint of our guidance for the full year. We are also excited about the step change we are expecting in our business as reflected by our 2024 targets We are building in our business, especially the additional scale that Yahoo!

Speaker 3

Will bring and the progress we are making towards becoming a must buy for advertisers looking to reach consumers in the open web. With that, let's open it up to questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now conduct a question and answer session. The first question comes from Andrew Boone from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Good morning and thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to go to the 2023 guide. You guys beat 2Q gross profit ex TAC by $13,000,000 Raising the midpoint of 2023 guidance by $6,000,000 So I guess the question is, is there some incremental weakness or something else you guys are seeing as we're entering Q or is that just conservatism? And then Adam, great to see the progress in terms of improving yield via Tools. Can you talk about MAX conversion and target CPA benefits and what that is helping to unlock in terms of budgets?

Speaker 4

Thanks so much.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Andrew. Good to hear from you. So I'll address the first one. So in terms of the full year guide, we obviously had a big beat in Q2, well, we beat the high end of our guidance by $8,000,000 on Next TAC and almost $10,000,000 on adjusted EBITDA. We want to be conservative though.

Speaker 3

So we don't want to count on that level of outperformance kind of continuing throughout the year in Q3 and Q4. Hence the fact that we kept the high end of our guidance the same while raising obviously the bottom end lower expectations are off the table at this point. So we'll raise the lower end. So it's really, as you said, it's conservatism. It's wanting to not count on that level of over performance throughout the year, even though we're obviously very happy that We did have that level of beat in Q2.

Speaker 2

Yes. Hi, Andrew. So on the based on the bidding strategy, so just To level set, we about half Taboola's R and D is working on performance advertising. And the reason is that we think there's a huge upside for Taboola To basically make advertisers successful, especially if we want to become the must buy open web company, we now have about 18,000 advertisers, Google has 10,000,000. So there's a huge range of how much we can capture more advertisers, big and small.

Speaker 2

But to do that, you have to make it easier for advertisers to be successful when they try And then once they're successful, you want to help them spend more and that's more of an NDR kind of dimension. If you look at Taboola Over the last many years, we built an amazing business where advertisers bid on Tableau using CPC. So they had to guess what is a click is worth, Whereby the way they think about their business is how much does the client worth. So if you're a flower my wife is a flower shop, so she knows how much a client is worth to her as a business. But if she was to work with TABULA, she would have to guess CPC.

Speaker 2

Right now, all she has to do is to say, well, this is how much a client is worth or Here's $5,000 budget with max conversion. You go to Taboola and help me get as many clients as I want and tell me what is the most affordable price A client could work as it comes from Taboola. This is a beginning of a revolution from my perspective Because that means that we can migrate tens of thousands of advertisers over time to work with Taboola and only focus on their own business objective, Their client acquisition cost, their budget, and so that's I'm happy to say that we all raised the toast at Tabula this week because Max conversion and target TPA is now general availability. So it's now available to any advertiser, self-service or enterprise Account, I suspect net 2024 more than 50% of our revenue and that's going to be a fairly large amount especially as Yahoo is ramping up. We'll be using advanced bidding strategies in AI such as Max conversion.

Speaker 2

The next in line by the way after that is Max revenue And next, ROAS, where advertisers could basically advertisers could tell us, we have more than one product we're selling through tebula, Here's the price of each one and maximize not only the conversions, but just make us more money. That is the next in line from product roadmap. So over time, CPCs will be completely part of our past. So I'm very excited about it and we're putting half of our tech energy on that.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from James Kopelman from T. D. Cowen.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Thanks and good morning. With e commerce outperforming, does this change at all your view of How big a percentage of the overall business e comm will be once we get past the near term macro that's created these unusual comps for core native advertising? In other words, How should we think about the mix of e commerce versus core going forward? And is there anything particular you would call out in the Q2 or the Q3 as being kind of the key 1 or 2 drivers of And then I have a follow-up for Steve.

Speaker 2

I can start, Steve. Feel free to jump in. And good morning, James. So one, it's really exciting to see e commerce, something we got into about 2 years ago with the acquisition of Connexity really paying off as it relates to the synergy with our business. We're seeing on the one side just great market fit, advertisers buying from Connexitin, SkimLinks are getting amazing value.

Speaker 2

And especially now when advertisers want to be close to the acquisition, they want attribution to be simple. They want to know that they're putting $1 in and they can make more than they spend. This is just a very profitable channel for them. It works. And the more we're adding new advertisers with the WILUS sales team, The more we see this business growing, so that's just the fundamental part of that business.

Speaker 2

On top of that, if you add turnkey, which you may have seen in my letter, I put a screenshot, We're seeing a phenomenal growth of essentially this is a great one of those there's more demand and supply. There are more publishers Who want to build a turnkey, which means for us to write the e commerce content for them using our data and then to drive traffic to it And then monetize it. If you go to time.comstamped, which is the e commerce website that Taboola and time.com partnered on, it's beautiful. It's ranked at the top of Google search. If you're searching for things like which checking account should I open or best smartphones of 2023, We are the top result on search engine.

Speaker 2

The page, it looks beautiful and it drives very high yield to the point that I think over time this might be even bigger than our core business for publishers, at least some of them. So this is a great momentum. We're still early in our turnkey, But I think this has big potential of becoming a big portion of our business over time. I think publishers, e commerce, They all want it. And I think it might be a third of their business over time.

Speaker 2

So the way I think about it is, If you're not offering e commerce to publishers, you may have nothing to offer over time because that's going to be a big portion of what they see as a growth engine.

Speaker 5

Great. And then a quick follow-up for Steve. We've been hearing other companies describe somewhat of a stabilization in the digital ad Over the last couple of months, how would you guys characterize what you're hearing in conversations with advertisers both in the U. S. And internationally?

Speaker 5

For example, Have you seen any change in video advertising trends, which I think were somewhat soft earlier in the year? Thanks a lot.

Speaker 3

Yes. So thanks for the question, James. So yes, we would say that what we're seeing in the digital advertising environment right now is stability. So in fact, ever since about Q3 last year, we've seen relative stability compared to, obviously, the first The second Q3 of last year. So we see relatively normal seasonality.

Speaker 3

We're seeing relative stability of budgets, etcetera. And I think most advertisers that we talk to what they're basically saying is they're still watching the macro a bit. They're probably getting a bit more bullish like a lot of People are about the potential for a soft landing and not a recession. But I think they're still cautious, But stable, their spend is stable, they're still spending kind of as they were. Now we are seeing ups and downs in different portions of our business.

Speaker 3

For instance, e Top of funnel video still remains soft relative to historical norms. So we haven't seen a further softening of it, but it's definitely soft Relative to historic history. And I think that's consistent with what we've said in the past, which is the further down the funnel you go, the more stability you get and the more Strength you get and the further towards the top of the funnel you are, the softer things are. So generally, that's consistent with what we're seeing. So we've seen pretty much Relative stability since the end of Q3 of last year and nothing has changed dramatically on that.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Laura Martin from Needham. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Good morning. Staying on the e commerce thing, Adam, I'm interested And whether you have channel conflicts because with these new companies where you're doing content, doesn't that threaten the actual companies that in your core business where Their core business is doing content? Why isn't this a channel conflict for you guys?

Speaker 2

So hey, Laura, good morning. So one thing we're working together. So the editorial team The publisher works very closely with the editorial team that we've built to create that content. So this is not Sort of like a vendorship type of relationship. It's very much a partnership that is deep.

Speaker 2

And in fact, what I like about it is that I think publishers in general Want to work with companies that are more partner type. CPM and being EdTech is just part of the past. It's not good enough. So you need to be able to build relationship that is driven by trust with the editorial team, the subscription team, the audience team, The commerce team, so all of those people on the publisher side take part in deciding who they're going to work with side by side to the revenue person. So one, this is very much a trust oriented relationship.

Speaker 2

And 2, it's very different type of writing, right? So when you cover The news or entertainment or things of that nature, it's very different than covering things like products or covering things such as financial services. And also there's a data element of what do users want to read to begin with. So we've been doing this with time.com as an example for almost 6 months now and it's a huge success. I mean We'll keep expanding how we're promoting that content on the homepage of time.com.

Speaker 2

Our teams are spending so much time together. I just hope we can do 100 times more at time.com from my perspective because it's really encouraging beginning.

Speaker 6

Great. And then my second one was, in your press release, you said that you started to roll out some of the Yahoo! Inventory offshore where there's a fewer Number of advertisers. Can you talk about what kind how is the inventory different in Yahoo! And what are you seeing?

Speaker 6

What are your early takes on The bigger Yahoo! Integration that you've learned from actually rolling out some of these offshore markets so far.

Speaker 2

Sure. If you remember when we announced Yahoo! 30 year strategic partnership. One of the things that I said is that and this was As an outsider, because we were not on Yahoo! At the time, I said, from what we know and what we're talking to industry executive, Working with Yahoo as an advertiser, it's a huge opportunity because the users are very engaged.

Speaker 2

It's almost 900,000,000 people a month We love Yahoo! The iconic brands that have been around for 30 years. So between the Mail, Yahoo! Finance, Sports, And users are super engaged and advertisers are capturing this engagement in the form of conversions and growth to them. So it's a very loyal advertiser base that love Yahoo!

Speaker 2

As much as consumers love them. This was then when I talked about it Just by talking to people in the industry and of course talking to Yahoo! Now we're live on the international markets. This is a smaller portion of Yahoo! Yahoo!

Speaker 2

Obviously, the U. S. Is the bigger portion. But what's really encouraging me and us is that now that we're able to bring some Taboola advertisers onto Yahoo! International Markets, we've kind of validated This very important assumption that Yahoo!

Speaker 2

Is awesome. That is that an advertiser spending on Yahoo! Is able to get great conversions. And what we hope is that as we're now moving to the next stage really the rest of the year, migrating advertisers on both sides and bringing that into one holistic mix, This will be a great opportunity for advertisers on both sides and we can continue to improve advertiser success as you know as our number one priority as a company. So what we know now is that it's awesome, it's small, but we're very excited to kind of continue to the next stage, into the And ramping that up in 2024.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Laura.

Operator

Thank and wait for your name to be announced. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Dan Day from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Yes. Good morning, guys. Appreciate you taking the questions. So just first one for Steve. Just looking at the guidance and backing into the cash operating costs, And I'm thinking about that really is the delta between gross profit and adjusted EBITDA.

Speaker 7

I think the back half implies around $65,000,000 or so per quarter. That had been more like $55,000,000 a quarter. I understand that's mostly due to these Yahoo! Integration expenses really starting to hit the income statement. But Can you just talk about how much of that incremental OpEx in the next couple of quarters is kind of stickier in nature and how much of it sort of one time in nature?

Speaker 3

Good to hear from you, Dan. So you're correct. Almost all of that uptick in the second half Comes from 2 areas. 1 is investment in Yahoo! So we will be doing incremental hiring to basically support the ramping of Yahoo!

Speaker 3

That will, As Adam said, start in the second half and then continue through the middle of next year. Those costs so there's 2 types of costs within that. So one is their salespeople and account managers to manage the revenue. Those are permanent. So we will always need those people to Manage the revenue coming from the relationship and in fact we think we'll be able to grow the relationship over time.

Speaker 3

So we may even grow The number of headcount that's supporting that as the revenue grows, because we typically see that Our sales and account management headcount tends to grow roughly in line with revenue. We gain some over time, but it grows roughly in line with revenue. So those will be permanent. The tech resources that we'll be bringing on to help with the transition, Those will be able to cycle off of the project once we get fully ramped for the most part. There's really nothing that is Dramatically special about the Yahoo!

Speaker 3

Setup that will require permanent people on that. So we'll be able to cycle them off. So we'll probably move them to other Projects at the end of the ramp, so by middle of next year. So that gives you an idea on the Yahoo! The second area that we will be doing some incremental hiring here is actually in e commerce.

Speaker 3

Since it's growing so well, we've identified a number of growth initiatives with e commerce that We think would be would benefit from incremental hiring would help us grow those faster. So we will be doing some incremental hiring there. I think we have enough initiatives there that those are effectively permanent. I mean, we're going to keep them on. They'll start doing new initiatives over time, They'll be effectively permanent, but they'll obviously come with a step up in our revenue there.

Speaker 3

So I hope that helps in terms of understanding kind of the cost base.

Speaker 7

Yes, that was great, Steve. Thanks. Follow-up, probably for Adam. You talked about in response to the last question, when can you do 100 of these Timestamp like deals with Turnkey Commerce. Just maybe talk about the pipeline to get new publishers up and running there.

Speaker 7

How hard is that like to get this started with new publisher partners? Just generally where you stand in terms of bringing on more partners for the

Speaker 2

Sure. And thanks for the question. So let me start with demand for the product. So I can tell you We have a lot of publishers who want to launch it. In fact, there are some publishers who offer to pay for the service because this is a rev share as a reminder, but Just is there any way to get priority to get on the platform given the success and how and people can check it out on their own.

Speaker 2

They don't even Need to ask us. You just search things and you see that the results are coming up high. So the demand for the product is It's great. It feels like a new iPhone and everybody wants it and there's a long line. Where we are in terms of providing that to many, many publishers, we're still we want to make sure that we're doing a good job.

Speaker 2

So we're very focused on our existing partners, Advanced Media and Time.com. There's another big one that We will hopefully be able to share over the next quarter and we're probably going to focus on those 3 for the rest of 2023. And then 2024, we'll figure out how much we want to expand that. So the good news is that you always want to be in a position where you have more people who want it than you can give it. And what we're trying to do right now is focus on our early adopters.

Speaker 2

We want to make sure that they're very happy and we're seeing success Because that's a priority for us. They took a chance on us, so we want to focus. But we're hopefully moving to more of a scale approach in 2024.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks for taking the questions.

Speaker 2

Of course.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Stephen Ju from Credit Suisse, please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Okay, great. Thank you. So, you've announced some nice publisher wins this quarter. Now, understandably, Yahoo! Is the one that everybody is focused on right now.

Speaker 4

But can you talk about what you're hearing from everybody else and when potentially some of the larger publishers may be coming up for RFP? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Sure. Good morning, Steve. So we And I mentioned it a little bit also on my letter. We're investing a lot in technology to make sure that when publishers either can help them drive audience growth, engagement growth and revenue diversification. And it's so great to see that our investments are penning out.

Speaker 2

So I'll give you one example. Homepage for you, which is a way to render using AI the entire homepage to personalize it completely to consumers. It's like one homepages turns into 1,000 homepages and that gets a lot of adoption. It's now we have self-service Options for networks of sites, and you'll hear a lot more publishers adopting it. So this is it's in GA and it's widely required by publishers.

Speaker 2

And this is something that we've been working on alongside Newsroom for 7 years or so. So it's a huge investment. It's a company on its own and Something publishers want as well as helping them get subscription and audience distribution with Taboola News. If you think about Generative AI and the risk of search traffic going down, publishers are asking themselves, which partner is going to help me get more audience? So with Taboola News now approaching $100,000,000 in revenue this year, it means that we're just going to continue to send more and more people to high quality journalism and the open web.

Speaker 2

So not only Taboola is the highest or among the highest revenue source, not only we're getting publishers to e commerce, We're empowering hundreds of editorial staff with homepage personalization. We help them diversify the revenue with subscription, All those things in time of them wanting deep partners. So you're seeing great names like Barstool and Nexstar, Star, which is these are huge wins, GEO Media, Express and more and the same dynamics all over the world. This is a global phenomenon of publishers Looking for tech providers that can do those things. Tableau is very special.

Speaker 2

We invest more in technology than others. So hopefully, we're right that this is where the industry is going. We think we're right. And in terms of others that are in the pipeline, there are great names That are out there that are thinking about who to work with and I hope to win them all.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Adam Sigota for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thanks everyone for joining us today. I'm very excited as you can tell about where we are and the momentum we see in our business. We're winning publishers in our core market, thanks to our technology investments, empowering editorial teams, helping publishers get subscribers, Launching their e commerce business and a lot more, I think publishers want less and less vendors and more strategic partners For 5, for 10, for 30 years, publishers want companies who invest in technology and can do more than just paying CPM. We're also bidding our expectation on e commerce, which is nearly 20% of our ex TAC. And I believe e commerce will be a big part of publishers revenue in the open web.

Speaker 2

We're bidding our expectation also on Taboola News, which is our version of Apple News for Android devices with partners like Samsung and Xiaomi, And this business is approaching $100,000,000 in revenue this year from $50,000,000 last year. Yahoo! Is now live on international markets And we validated it's an amazing place for advertisers to be. Our relationship with Yahoo! Leadership is just stronger than ever.

Speaker 2

And lastly, we expect to grow more than 10% in revenue in the second half of twenty twenty three. And in Q4, I expect us to grow more than 20% versus last quarter last year. These are exciting times for us at Taboola and also for the industry. I'm convinced There needs to be a Google type company dedicated to the open web and journalism that can be a must buy so advertisers Can for the first time ever rely on that company and we have a real shot at being that one. Thanks again everyone for joining us today we look forward to talking to many of you over the next few weeks.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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Key Takeaways

  • Q2 Outperformance: Taboola reported Q2 revenue of $332 M, beating the high end of guidance by $23 M, with ex-TAC gross profit of $123.1 M and adjusted EBITDA of $15.7 M, prompting a raise in full-year 2023 guidance.
  • E-commerce Momentum: E-commerce now represents nearly 20% of ex-TAC (up from 15% last quarter), driven by strong merchant retention and the early success of Taboola Turnkey Commerce with partners like Time.com.
  • Taboola News Growth: The Taboola News feed, integrated on Android devices via Samsung and Xiaomi, is on track to approach $100 M in revenue this year, up from $50 M in 2022.
  • Yahoo! Partnership Rollout: The 30-year Yahoo! collaboration is live in international markets, with plans to migrate advertisers and ramp U.S. inventory in H2 2023, targeting full run-rate contribution by mid-2024.
  • AI-Powered Bidding: Advanced bidding tools like Maximize Conversions and Target CPA are now generally available, with over 50% of 2024 revenue expected to leverage these AI strategies to simplify advertiser goals and boost ROI.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Taboola.com Q2 2023
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