Taboola acquires Connexity for $800 million to expand its recommendations platform | ZDNet

Content discovery and recommendation company Taboola said Friday that it’s buying Connexity for $800 million. The deal is meant to help Taboola expand its recommendations with new content types and enter new segments. 

Founded in 2007, New York-based Taboola is a marketing and revenue driver service for websites and apps seeking to monetize their content. The company caters to over 13,000 publishers that reach over 500 million users per day. 

Connexity, meanwhile, runs a platform that lets publishers integrate retail product offers on their websites. It also offers a bevy of other monetization tools, like affiliate links,  in-stream advertising and shopping search ads. The company was owned by Symphony Technology Partners since 2011.

Taboola said that by coupling its technology with Connexity’s retail index, which includes more than 750 million product offers, it will be able to launch a new type of recommendation geared toward advertisers and publishers that connects editorial content to product recommendations.

“The rise of social commerce proves the value of commerce alongside content, and with Connexity, Taboola is primed to bring this value to the open web,” said Adam Singolda, Taboola CEO. “e-Commerce is the future of the open web, consumers will be buying outside of Amazon, on publishers’ sites next to trusted editorial content a lot more than they are today. Amazon has millions of merchants, but merchants mainly have Amazon. That changes today. Combining Taboola and Connexity’s technologies is one step forward in creating an alternative to walled gardens.”

Taboola said Connexity generated $151 million of revenue, $63 million of ex-TAC gross profit and $28 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2019. Last year those figures increased to $172 million of revenue, $78 million of ex-TAC gross profit and $38 million of adjusted EBITDA.

Bill Glass, Connexity CEO, and the Connexity management team will lead a newly formed business unit at Taboola.

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