Taboola.com Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Taboola beat the high end of its Q2 guidance with $465.5 M revenue (+9% YoY), $172.1 M ex-TAC gross profit (+15%), $45.2 M adjusted EBITDA (+21%) and $34.2 M free cash flow (+31%).
  • Positive Sentiment: The company raised full-year 2025 guidance across all metrics and the board approved an incremental $200 M share repurchase, bringing total buyback authorization to $285 M after repurchasing ~$100 M in Q2 (~12% of shares outstanding).
  • Positive Sentiment: Realize, Taboola’s new performance advertising platform, has seen early traction with 650 advertisers testing since February and delivered cases of 34% better performance and a 65% budget increase from existing clients.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Taboola reports minimal impact from LLM-driven search changes, maintaining ~5% search traffic share with effects limited to the mid single digits to date.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Taboola.com Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tabula Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press 11 on your telephone.

Operator

You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Jessica Caracos, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Operator

Thank you, and

Speaker 1

good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tabula's second quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call. I'm here with Adam Congolda, Tabula's Founder and CEO and Steve Walker, Tabula's CFO. The company issued earnings materials today before the market, and they are available to the Investors section of Tabula's 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 the earnings release and refer to non GAAP financial measures.

Speaker 1

For definitions and reconciliations to GAAP, please refer to the non GAAP tables in the earnings release posted on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Adam.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Jessica. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. Let me start by saying that I'm happy with our Q2 performance and the momentum we're seeing since exiting the quarter. We delivered a strong second quarter, beating the high end of our guidance across all key metrics. Buying back about 12% of the company in just the first half of the year, reflecting our confidence in the business and our long term vision.

Speaker 2

As a result, we're raising full year guidance across the board and are continuing to aggressively buy back shares. We're also seeing exciting early traction with Realize, our new performance advertising platform, and we truly believe we're just getting started. Before we go deeper on the quarter and our outlook, I want to quickly remind everyone who we are, the opportunity we're going after, and why we believe we can win. Taboola is one of the largest performance advertising platforms on the open web. Our platform, Realize, helps businesses of all sizes get leads and grow sales.

Speaker 2

It operates similar to Google Ads or Meta Ads, offering a simple to use platform powered by AI. The key difference is that while Google reaches users in search and Meta in social, Realize engages 600,000,000 people every day across the open web on publisher sites like Yahoo, NBC, ESPN, USA Today, Apple News, Samsung and others, driving those people to action. Our competitive advantage lies in our AI and first party data drawn from what people actually read about versus what people idealize of themselves in social media, giving advertisers authentic insights into user intent and high performing outcomes. In 2025, we expect nearly $2,000,000,000 in gross revenue and approximately 700,000,000 in exact gross profit, which is what we keep after we pay our partners and a key metric for our business. We expect to generate over $200,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA at a 30% margin with strong free cash flow.

Speaker 2

As search and social advertisers are mixing out and can't get more growth, advertisers are looking for scalable, performance driven alternatives. Taboola is uniquely positioned to take a share in what we estimate is a $55,000,000,000 opportunity and lead that shift across the open web. With that, we can turn to our second quarter results. Our second quarter revenues, ag tech, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA all came in above the high end of our guidance range. With the second quarter, we reported revenues of $465,000,000 representing growth of 9% year over year.

Speaker 2

Expected gross profit of 172,000,000, 15% higher than last year. Adjusted EBITDA of 45,000,000, 21% higher than last year with margin expanding significantly. And finally, free cash flow of $34,000,000 grew 31% year over year, allowing us to buy back about a $100,000,000 worth of stock in the quarter. In addition, we're pleased to announce that our board has approved an incremental 200,000,000 to our share repurchase program, reflecting our confidence in the long term value of the business. Moving to our quarterly highlights.

Speaker 2

As we discussed at our Investor Day, accelerating AgTech gross profit is our North Star because it ultimately fuels our strong profitability and free cash flow generation. When you look at the 15% growth we saw in XTAC this quarter, it was primarily driven by three things. First, we saw nearly 9% growth in the number of scaled advertisers, which are those spending over $100,000 in the last twelve months. This means they see good return with Kabula and are likely to stick around. Revenue from scaled advertisers represents the vast majority of our revenue.

Speaker 2

Second, the average revenue per scaled advertiser rose about 2% versus last year. The third was an easier comparison in the first half, given Yahoo was fully ramped by the end of the second quarter. As we shared last quarter, our top priority for accelerating growth is the success of Realize, our new performance ads platform. Realize expands our reach beyond native advertising into the broader performance market across display and social, unlocking new opportunities for growth. This expansion is important as it not only allows us to capture larger budgets from existing advertisers, but also work with new advertisers and agencies who have never botanated before.

Speaker 2

While it's still early days and not yet material financially, we're encouraged by the momentum we're seeing as six fifty advertisers have already tested our new display and social capabilities since the February launch. Let me share a few Q2 examples that showcase the kind of performance advertisers are already seeing with Realize. One good example is a company in the aviation space that never worked with us before. With Realize, they tried our new display capability, which means they could import their display creative into Realize, they shared their performance objective, and we were able to beat their performance goal by 34% and maximize travel bookings on their platform. This success led to increased spend with us, which is exactly what you want to see in this type of cases.

Speaker 2

Another example I like is in the real estate space. One of our existing advertisers who has bought native advertising from us for two years now was interested in finding new ways to grow. Their goal was to drive more local awareness to their modular homes in specific locations around the country. While their native spend was growing with realized new capabilities by importing their vertical display campaigns, they were able to see stronger overall conversion rates. This improves the return on ad spend, and as a result, they grew their display budget by 65% and are still growing.

Speaker 2

These are just a few examples, but they're consistent with what we're seeing more broadly in our early tests with customers. Realize is helping advertisers drive better performance outcomes at scale on the open web, which we believe will translate into incremental dollars being spent on our network, and we're just getting started. Now moving to our unique supply initiative. While attracting more ad spend for Taboola and our existing publisher partners is our main priority, we're also hard at work adding incredible new open web partners who have unique supply and data that performance advertisers really want. Tabula News is a great example of unique supply and is seeing double digit growth.

Speaker 2

Advertisers love Tabula News because it gives them a way to reach consumers before they enter social media, before they open and browse the web at a high intent, high impact moment, and it delivers strong performance in return. Another point of strength that is worth noting as it relates to our publisher partners is the minimal effect we're experiencing from LLM driven changes in search dynamics. There are two key factors that help minimize the impact on Taboola as well as our publisher partners. First, we're fortunate that the vast majority of our publisher partners are top tier enterprises, including names like ESPN, USA Today, CNBC, and Nexstar, who benefit from strong brand recognition and loyal audiences. As a result, they enjoy substantial direct traffic with search traffic typically accounting for just about 30% to 40% of their total.

Speaker 2

Second, a significant portion of our revenue comes from open web platform partnerships, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and others, which receive little to no search traffic to begin with. These two pillars of our supply base has helped our publishers stay strong, as well as us, maintaining a blended search traffic share of around 5%. To date, we have not seen material impact from recent changes in the search market driven by LLM. Performance remains stable with year to date effects limited to the mid single digits. In summary, when I look at the open web, I see a major opportunity for the market and for us.

Speaker 2

Advertisers need alternative to search and social in all parts of the open web. Companies like The Trade Desk have done a great job capturing top of the funnel video and CTV campaign. And App Loving has excelled in the app ecosystem. And there is a massive opportunity to become the performance advertising company for everything else, mobile, desktop, OEM, messaging apps, and more. And that's exactly what we're focused on and Realize is the key to unlocking our true potential in this market.

Speaker 2

I'm so proud of our teams for the way we're executing in the first half. For launching Realize, again, existing and new clients, hundreds of them to try it out. As we're getting more budgets, it means we're able to generate even more revenue for our partners, making our share of wallet greater. There's a lot of momentum we're seeing. We beat our Q2 guidance.

Speaker 2

We're raising our full year guidance. We're generating meaningful cash flow, which allow us to invest in the business and buy a lot of shares back. With that, I'll hand it over to Steve to walk you through our Q2 results and outlook in more detail.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Adam, and good morning, everyone. As Adam mentioned, we had a strong first half of the year. In the second quarter, we reported results above the high end of our guidance across all key metrics. Second quarter revenues reached $465,500,000 representing 8.7% year over year growth. Our revenue growth this quarter was driven by an 8.5% year over year increase in the number of scaled advertisers, coupled with a 1.8% year over year increase in average revenue per scaled advertiser.

Speaker 3

This reflects strong execution on both acquiring new advertisers and deepening relationships with existing ones. While these two metrics can sometimes move in opposite directions as newer advertisers typically start at lower spend levels, this quarter saw broad based strength across both, which is a positive signal for the health and momentum of our business. As I have said in the past, I'm particularly encouraged by the growth in the number of advertisers because they are essentially the fuel for our future growth. Ex TAC gross profit reached $172,100,000 representing 15.1% year over year growth. This included a 45 basis point tailwind from foreign exchange rates.

Speaker 3

Growth was primarily driven by higher advertising spend, margin expansion on certain digital publishers and strong contributions from Tabula News and Bidded Supply. The growth rate also benefited from a favorable comparison to last year due to the onboarding of Yahoo! Advertisers.

Speaker 4

Gross profit for the quarter was $135,600,000 primarily benefiting from strong ex TAC gross profit growth.

Speaker 3

As mentioned last quarter, gross profit also benefited from reductions in our other cost of revenues driven by lower server and network infrastructure costs, some of which came from a reduction in depreciation expenses related to our servers due to a reassessment of their useful. Our net loss was $4,300,000 with non GAAP net income coming in positive at $30,200,000 Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was 45,200,000 reflecting 21.3% year over year growth. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 26.2%, which improved by 130 basis points versus Q2 twenty twenty four. This improvement reflects our healthy year over year ex TAC growth, along with strong cost discipline that we exercised in 2024 and the 2025. In terms of cash generation, we had $47,400,000 in operating cash flow in the second quarter and free cash flow of $34,200,000 which is over 30% higher than the same quarter last year.

Speaker 3

Our free cash flow benefited significantly from a couple of factors, primarily higher adjusted EBITDA margins and strong management of our working capital. Our free cash flow conversion from adjusted EBITDA has been over 70% over the last four and the last eight quarters, which we are very happy about. Looking forward, while we continue to expect to convert free cash flow from adjusted EBITDA at a 50% to 60% rate over any typical trailing eight quarter period, I would expect to remain at the higher end of that range. Turning to the balance sheet, we remain in a strong financial position. We ended the second quarter with a net cash balance of $27,200,000 Cash and cash equivalents totaled $115,200,000 which more than offset our long term debt of $88,000,000 As a reminder, earlier this year, we secured a new $270,000,000 revolving credit facility, allowing us to fully repay our prior long term loan while maintaining over $180,000,000 in available capacity as of June 30.

Speaker 3

This facility also allowed us to reduce our interest expense by $1,200,000 in the second quarter. With this facility, we can operate with a lower cash balance while preserving access to significant liquidity. Regarding share repurchases, we continue to believe share repurchases are one of the most compelling uses of capital. In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 32,000,000 shares at an average price of $3.13 for a total consideration of $100,100,000 Through July, we've repurchased an additional 3,100,000.0 shares at an average price of $3.59 for a total of $11,000,000 In July, our Board authorized an incremental $200,000,000 bringing our total authorization as of August 1 to approximately $285,000,000 During the first half of the year, as Adam stated, we bought back nearly 12% of our total shares outstanding, shrinking our shares outstanding from about $337,000,000 at the 2024 to about $297,000,000 at the 2025. Moving to guidance, for the third quarter twenty twenty five, we are raising our guidance and expect revenues to be between $461,000,000 and $469,000,000 gross profit to be between $127,000,000 and $133,000,000 ex TAC gross profit to be 166,000,000 to $172,000,000 adjusted EBITDA to range from $43,000,000 to $48,000,000 and non GAAP net income to be 29,000,000 to $34,000,000 For the full year, we are raising our guidance across the board.

Speaker 3

We now expect revenues to be between 1,860,000,000.00 and $1,890,000,000 gross profit to be between $541,000,000 and $555,000,000 ex TAC gross profit to be $689,000,000 to $7.00 $3,000,000 adjusted EBITDA to be $2.00 $8,000,000 to $214,000,000 and non GAAP net income to be 138,000,000 to $144,000,000 This guidance reflects a strong first half of the year and continued momentum across our business entering the second half. When you are comparing each of the quarters this year to the same quarter last year, you must keep in mind the onboarding of Yahoo, which ramped in the 2024 and impacted quarterly comparisons. As a result, we believe the full year projected growth rate of 3% to 5%, which normalizes for these dynamics, is the best representation of the true growth of our core business. Investors should anticipate growth rates similar to this year for the time being as we focus on returning to consistent double digit growth. In summary, we're pleased to report a strong first half of the year with results exceeding the high end of our guidance and giving us the confidence to raise our full year outlook.

Speaker 3

With clear momentum across the growth initiatives we outlined at Investor Day and a significant runway ahead, we believe we are well positioned to continue delivering meaningful value for our shareholders over the long term. With that, let's move to Q and A. Operator, can you please open the lines for questions?

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again. First question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

Operator

Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Thanks for taking the question. Good morning. So I guess, literally just kind of going on to what you just talked about, so what's the roadmap from here to get back to double digits from the current 3% to 5%? How much of that is investing more in sales, better sales, ad tech? Take us through how do you get back to double digit?

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Jason. How are you doing? So I think in terms of looking like how do we get back to double digit growth, I think first of all, let me talk about how to think about our business right now. So we obviously don't want to guide to next year or anything like that. Having said that, the best way to look at our forward looking growth rates is to look at our full year guide now, which is 3% to 5%.

Speaker 3

That guide doesn't include realize. And obviously, the path back to double digit growth is for realize to start to allow us to win more budgets from social, win more budgets from display, basically to expand into that much larger TAM that we talked about at our Investor Day. That is the primary thing that needs to happen to get back to double digit growth. For now, we're not baking it into our guide for the rest of this year. And I think the way to think about our business is that 3% to 5% growth, but we think Realize can get us back to double digit growth.

Speaker 4

And then just a quick follow-up. So obviously, marketing has gotten increasingly competitive. It's static for a lot of reasons. Maybe talk about why you think the product fits the need of marketers right now. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I can get this one. So in general, think we've realized the first thing we did is we made it very easy for advertisers, big and small, to work with us. So we're no longer asking them for specialized type of workflow. They can import their social formats. They can import their display formats.

Speaker 2

It's very much like a Google Ad Manager, whereby they give us their goal. We advise them using AI what budget they should use. And from that point on, take it across all of our different types of supply. And I think because Tabula has such a huge distribution with incredible partners such as Yao and Apple and Microsoft and Disney and NBC, USA Today, local sites, sports sites, we have reached to consumers such that we get to see outside of Google and Meta, we see people on a consistent basis, probably more than anyone in the open web. And then alongside our investment in AI, which is now very significant, we're very good at looking for conversions quickly for advertisers.

Speaker 2

And then from there, grow the budget. I spoke about earlier on my remarks about a few case studies out of hundreds of advertisers that have tested, realized. And we're seeing exactly the type of dynamics you want to see. One, we're working with new advertisers that beforehand did not work with Tabula because of us being specialized and focused on native. Now that we make it easier for people to try us out, we're seeing new advertisers that are trying to realize and are succeeding.

Speaker 2

And the second thing we're seeing is growth in budgets. And as Steve had mentioned, that is the main focus for the company, to get more advertisers to work with us and to get budgets to go up and right. So I think we're best positioned outside of Meta and Google to find conversions for advertisers because it's easy. We have the distribution. We have the data and AI to make it work.

Speaker 5

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. The next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham and Company. Go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Hey, and I want to follow-up on this answer you just gave to Jason's question. I would have said that this 2% increase in budget is disappointing because I agree with what you just said. The increasing budget from existing clients is the whole purpose behind Realize to try to get some of those native clients display budget. So, the 9% increase in scale clients is really impressive, the 2% is really disappointing. And I do think that's our primary focus.

Speaker 6

So, why isn't that growth higher for existing clients, do you think?

Speaker 3

Yeah. Hi, Laura. I think that's a good And I think it's thanks for prompting on because it's important for us to talk about that. I think we have a good slide in our backup deck that's on our investors. Tabula.com that you can take a look at.

Speaker 3

What you see there is that the number of scaled advertisers continues to grow and you see kind of a nice up into the right trend. The average revenue per scaled advertiser has been kind of in that similar range for probably seven or eight quarters now. But the reason for that is the existing advertisers that we do have that have already been in that scaled category are growing. They're growing year over year and that is the growth. But as we bring on new advertisers, they tend to start at the lower end of that range and then they kind of grow over time.

Speaker 3

So they bring down the average somewhat. So basically, it's just because of the fact that we continue to grow that number of scaled advertisers that brings down the overall average.

Speaker 6

So this isn't the same store number. You're not looking at the prior year scaled advertiser

Speaker 1

Correct.

Speaker 6

Holding that constant and look at theirs. You're allowing the new ones to lower the average. Oh.

Speaker 7

That's correct.

Speaker 3

So, it's not a same store. But, by the way, that is a very interesting observation and maybe something that we'll look at in the future, giving some indication of more same store.

Speaker 6

Yeah. I think that would be the better the more interesting number if it's growing faster than 2%. Because 2%, if that's your primary focus, does not look very impressive. But

Speaker 3

anyway yeah.

Speaker 6

And then, Adam, for you, open web. So, you know, sort of an increasing number of people are saying the open web is dead in part because this Google search moving to Google answers and sort of chat GPT, answering questions rather than sending links, really does threaten for the open web writ large. And I understood your point that you have the best, like, biggest brand clients. But I mean, even if a biggest brand client has 30% of its search traffic coming from search, that's about to go to zero in theory over the next five years. So they don't really sound very immune.

Speaker 6

But more importantly, I'd like you to discuss the whole notion of does the open Internet survive, the change in generative AI search behavior?

Speaker 2

Hello, good morning. I think that's a great question. So a few things. Just starting with some stats, then we can go into where I think it's going. So overall, for us as a company, we have seen a minimal impact to date from LLM driven search changes.

Speaker 2

I spoke about 5% of our US traffic as of now comes from search. And that's primarily because we have two types of publishers, one that are very big and are known brands who have a lot of direct traffic. So for them, search is 30%, 40. And then we have sort of like big platforms such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and others. They don't get any search traffic.

Speaker 2

They're fairly or very little. So for that reason, as a company, we have about 5% comes from search, Google search specifically. And the decline we've seen is in the mid single digits. So as of now, it's not material. To me, in fact, that was the meeting I had before coming here today.

Speaker 2

I think where it's going is very exciting to me. I think that while search traffic may go down and will reduce page views to publishers from that perspective, there is a new kind of birth of new type of traffic that will go up. And that is LLM on publisher sites. And I think if you may have seen it's been our deeper dive, and I spoke about that. But to me, publishers, for the first time that have trust with consumers, could capitalize on offering LLM to consumers and create a new touchpoint and a new interaction with consumers that may be worth a lot more than the search traffic they lose.

Speaker 2

So if I'm a financial publisher or a sports publisher or a local site or a national site for the travel section, someone talking on my site about the travel they may take or mortgage you're considering taking using LLM, which is a behavior they're used to on shared GPT, will be worth a fortune in my opinion. So I can tell you, I just booked a trip with my family in August. I started on Chegg GPT. I spent thirty seconds there, but then I spent thirty minutes across the web looking for reviews and images because I didn't want my wife to be upset that I'm taking her to a bad place. So I think the consumer behavior is that you start with some engines, but you then spend a lot of time reviewing, reading, getting curious and educated before you make a decision.

Speaker 2

And that's where the open web shines. So I think that there's a huge opportunity for LLM thriving on the open web in ways that we have not seen yet.

Speaker 6

Okay. Super helpful. And then my last question, which is my third question, is walk me through why you would I love the fact you're shrinking the capital base, but why would you spend $100,000,000 buying in shares and not touch the $88,000,000 worth of debt when we don't have an ad tech company other than you guys, really, that has financial leverage?

Speaker 3

Yeah. No. That's a good question, Laura. So the way we're managing it right now is we're basically using the revolver as our cushion to allow us to keep basically cash neutral roughly. So you saw we had about $27,000,000 of net cash at the end of last quarter.

Speaker 3

But throughout the quarter, that fluctuates between kind of a negative net cash balance of around 30,000,000 to $40,000,000 up to a positive cash balance of up to about 50,000,000 to $60,000,000 And we use the revolver to manage that. So the way we're managing is we're managing to roughly cash neutral on an average basis over course of the quarter, and then using the excess cash flow we have beyond that to buy back shares. And we think that's the right way to do it because, A, it's very low risk. We generally speaking have enough cash to pay off the revolver at any given moment anyway. But it's also fairly capital efficient because we're able to swing into negative net cash territory for brief periods using the revolver and continue to be aggressive in our share buyback.

Speaker 3

So that's the way we're managing things. And generally, the other thing I would say is if you do the kind of capital structure math, we should be buying back shares in our belief, up to a much higher share price. So we think it's a good use of cash as well.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Laura.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. The next question comes from the line of Matt Condon with Citizens. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first one is just on REALWISE. Can you just walk through again what are the potential gating factors as far as that ramping here at the end of 2025, maybe into 2026? Is it a function of just getting into annual budgeting and breaking in there? Can you just talk about just how we should think about the ramp into 2026?

Speaker 2

Yeah, I can start. So the biggest thing is, as you know from Realize, the biggest opportunity for us is that we're tapping into a much bigger market of essentially performance budgets. So if you think about advertisers, way they think about the future, think now more than ever, performance advertising is becoming the key part that advertisers want to make sure they're good at. And they're diversified outside of search and social. In a world that's a bit volatile and things are changing, the first thing advertisers stop is brand dollars.

Speaker 2

And the last thing they stop is their kind of oxygen line, which is the performance advertising budget. And we realize we're tapping into two types of kind of parts of that market. The first one is display advertising budget, which is highly fragmented. So here, Realize needs to essentially be better than alternative epic platforms that are getting, we estimate to be more than $10,000,000,000 a year. Many, many, many small companies that are getting a piece of that pie.

Speaker 2

And we think Google has a significant advantage because of our first party data, because of our AI and distribution to allow us to take a piece of that sort of $10,000,000,000 display budget. That's part of it. The second thing is that advertisers tell us that when they spend money on social at large, they're seeing some diminishing return at the tail of their spend. So if you look at kind of like their conversion rates over time, it starts well on social platforms and then they get to kind of their goal. And then at the end of that campaign, a lot of times, it's too expensive.

Speaker 2

So they would love to give us 10%, 50% of their social spend and see if we can drive similar performance. So we've realized we're hard at work going after those two buckets. I think the first one, the display one, we're seeing kind of a lot of traction because again, it's highly fragmented. And I think we have an advantage there and social will be longer term for us. But that's how I see us doubling and tripling Tabula's revenue in years to come, taking advantage again of our first party data and technology.

Speaker 2

And I'm happy that we're conservative in the way we think about the business to give our team an opportunity to work hard, keep innovating and learning from the market and essentially see budget growth, which will drive the company's growth over time.

Speaker 5

Great. That's very helpful. And then my second one is just on the growth with scale of advertisers. Can you just talk about what were the drivers there? Was it just better budgets out of existing clients because of improved macro environment or were there new customer acquisitions?

Speaker 5

Can you just talk about what was the driver there?

Speaker 3

Yeah, so I think if you look at the two numbers, the number of scaled advertisers grew about 9% and the average revenue per scaled advertiser grew about 2%. The number of scaled advertiser has been consistently growing for us over the last few years, and that frankly is just good sales effort from our sales teams, bringing on new customers and then working to grow them over time. I think it kind of speaks to our advantage as a performance platform, the fact that we are able to show that performance to the advertisers and get them to scale with us. That's why we've been able to grow the number of scaled advertisers over time. And as I said to Laura earlier, I think generally what I want to see for now is that the average revenue per scaled advertiser stays in that relative range that it's been right now and doesn't shrink per se.

Speaker 3

But as long as it's staying in that range, I think being able to grow the number of scaled advertiser is really important because that, as I've said in my prepared remarks and in past quarters, that's the fuel for future growth because now we can work to grow those advertisers even more over time.

Speaker 5

Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Next question comes from the line of Riley Securities. Go ahead.

Operator

Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Yes. Hi. Good morning, Adam and Steve. Congrats on the solid quarter, and thanks for taking my questions. First question, can you give us an update in terms of just the overall tariff environment?

Speaker 8

I know during your last earnings call, you mentioned kind of a modest headwind out of China with some of your customers and impacts on the advertising spend there. So any sort of update you can give on that front and kind of the assumptions that you're making for second half of this year?

Speaker 3

Yeah. So, the simple answer on the assumptions that we're making for the second half of the year is more of the same. And as we said last quarter, we did see a reduction in China spend or China revenue to our business. It's not material. It was less than 1% or right around 1%.

Speaker 3

And currently, accounts for about 5% of our revenue. So it's not the impact hasn't been huge. But we're assuming that that does not really come back the rest of the year. And in fact, last year Q4, China was actually an area of strength for us. So, we're not factoring that into the guide for the rest of the year.

Speaker 3

And so we've taken it into account and assumed kind of more of what we're seeing right now. By the way, we've seen a very slight recovery in the China revenue, but nothing material at this point, which is why we're not factoring any recovery into our guidance.

Speaker 8

Understood. And nice to see the continued expansion of the share repurchase program. Steve, any sort of update you can get around kind of approval from Israeli authorities in terms of the 25% holder? Just curious on that front or just maintaining the existing structure that you have in place right now.

Speaker 3

Yeah. No, good question. So, first of all, just to kind of explain to everybody what it is that you mentioned about the buyback. So, we just got an additional $200,000,000 of authorization for our buyback. So we've got about $285,000,000 of total authorization for our buyback now.

Speaker 3

We chose to do that kind of during this quarter just to be proactive because Israel has regulations around what you have some hoops you have to jump through in order to get the approval to be able to do buybacks. It takes some time, so we wanted to do that kind of mid quarter here and get it set up. So it's just being proactive. In terms of the approval for not having to buy back shares from Yahoo to the exception from the or exemption from the 25% rule, unfortunately, I don't have anything specific or any specific update on that currently. We're working on it.

Speaker 3

We'll update you when we have something material to say about it, but unfortunately, don't even have a timeline at this point.

Speaker 8

Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

Speaker 3

Thanks. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. The last question comes from James Kopelman with TD Cowen. Go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks for taking the questions, guys. Congrats on the quarter. Have a couple. First for Adam, I think you mentioned Tabula news growing double digits.

Speaker 7

Maybe any additional or updated color on how big you see the opportunity at Tabula News over time compared to what I think at one point was a historical run rate around $100,000,000 in revenue. What do you see as the near term opportunities for Tabula News? Should we expect to see a broader rollout of countries and device OEMs? Or is future growth being driven primarily by some of the prior metrics, higher engagement, yield, etcetera? And then I have one or two follow ups.

Speaker 2

Sure. Thanks for the question. Good morning. So a few things about It falls really great for them to realize strategy of having supply that is unique, that converts and advertisers like.

Speaker 2

So in this case, just as a reminder for people, this is where Taboola is the news experience on devices such as Xiaomi and Samsung and others that where they see it on their lock screen or they have to swipe right to see the news feed from all of our publishers. They click on that and then we're the first thing they do before they open a browser, before they open social network. Tibula is the first experience they have on their device. So it's a very special moment on a consumer journey. So the second quarter was good.

Speaker 2

It's growing faster than the company. And we're seeing growth in devices and performance and new touch points that we're testing with. Without getting into too much kind of guidance on this, I'll just say it's we're having good momentum and we'll continue to invest in this. And again, the main thing we are trying to do is get more devices, more partners around the world that are good for our advertisers and can give us more kind of unique supply that we want to get for Realize. So overall, like the business, it's growing faster, and it's something that is relevant to Realize strategy.

Speaker 7

And then just a quick follow-up, I guess, either for Adam or for Steve. Just given the ongoing macro uncertainty, what's your sense of conditions in the digital ad market as we head into late summer? What are you hearing from your conversations with clients with regards to ad budgets in

Speaker 3

the second half of

Speaker 7

the year? And maybe just remind us again, what's the geographic split of your business, North America versus other regions?

Speaker 3

Yes. Good questions. So first of all, on the macro side of things, we're seeing basically continued stability. So I think we've talked about in the past that the way our advertiser partners talk about their view of things is that there's they're keeping a close eye on things. Obviously, the tariffs and everything that's going on with the tariffs is concerning to them, but they're not cutting spend.

Speaker 3

They're just keeping an eye on it. So that's kind of what we're still hearing from our advertiser partners. So generally speaking, that has continued. And I think that's what we built into our guide, as I mentioned earlier, is basically that we expect kind of continued stability of the ad markets. In terms of our geographic split, we're fairly diversified.

Speaker 3

We are about with bringing on Yahoo! We're about 50% US plus, but we are pretty well diversified outside The US as well. And even where we have revenue inside The US, in many cases, the advertisers are spending globally with us. So, it's brands that are trying to reach consumers globally and we're a good global source of that because we have a lot of traffic and eyeballs outside The US. So about 50% U.

Speaker 3

S, but very well globally diversified.

Speaker 7

Great. Last quick one for Steve. I think sales and marketing G

Speaker 3

and A might have been just

Speaker 7

a touch higher than what we were modeling heading in. Anything to call out drive to drive the slight increase there? And then how should we

Speaker 3

think about modeling, I guess, in the second half or any commentary on headcount? Yes. So the first quarter and second quarter had a couple of unusual timing items between the two. So if you look at our first quarter expenses and then our second quarter, first quarter was lower, second quarter ticked up quite a bit. I would look at the average of those two quarters to give you a good sense of what the third quarter and fourth quarter will be.

Speaker 3

So second quarter was actually higher than it should have been because of the timing issues with Q1. So think of the average of those two quarters going forward. I think that's the best way to look at it, frankly.

Speaker 7

Okay, great. Very helpful. Appreciate all the color today, guys.

Operator

Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Adam Singolda, CEO, for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. As you see, we've had a strong second quarter and ready to build on its momentum throughout the year. Realize, which is our main focus as a company to grow spend from advertisers and grow Taboola, is early days, but we like what we're seeing and we're just getting started. We're laser focused, going after the performance advertising market, giving advertisers choice beyond Google and Meta. Thanks again, everyone, for continued support, and we're looking forward to talking to all of you in weeks to come.

Operator

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

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