Open Web Needs Its Own AI Interface in Next Revenue Chapter: Taboola's Adam Singolda

Taking a step back, I think we've seen the consumer changing so much, expecting LLMs to be something they can use on a daily basis. Obviously, some use GPT, some use Gemini. ChatGPT has no ads, Gemini has ads. So we've seen two different types of consumer LLM experiences. But then there's the rest of the world—the open web, publishers we love and trust, OEMs, apps, everything outside of the walled gardens. And I would say OpenAI is a new walled garden. So we launched Deeper Dive, which is a company I would start if I weren't at Taboola, because there's such a need in my opinion for this interface to exist everywhere. If you go back in time, when Google.com became a big deal, the next thing that happened was site search, because consumers when they visited websites they expected to be able to search. And I believe that over the next two, three, four, five years, LLM is going to be a Web 2.0 type of thing. It's going to be the way consumers interact with journalism, local, national, and all those beautiful brands they love to visit. So Deeper Dive is there to be the first free LLM for publishers to enable that experience with advertising that is relevant for the query and the consumer to create a new revenue stream. So in a world where search traffic will go down, I think it's less impactful to the big publishers because they have a lot of direct traffic, and I'm a bit more concerned about the long tail. Still, you have to ask yourself, all those millions of people that go to those websites they love, how are they going to have this experience? And Deeper Dive is there to offer that. We're very excited. We launched it with USA Today here in the US and The Independent outside of the US, and since then we've had many publishers launching it. So you should stay tuned for more great names, and we're seeing great results.

Yeah, I think it's a big theme here also at CES. I mean, just the value and desire for marketers and agencies and platforms to justify spend from the get-go. There is no more real space for marketers or platforms to kind of have this top-of-the-funnel hope strategy: 'I'm going to put money and see what happens.' Those days are slowly going away if they're not already gone. And we're seeing it. I think Amazon has done such a good job with Prime, saying, 'Look, if you put an ad on Prime big screen, we will show you that it's not only great to generate that impact to the top of the funnel, it's also going to go down-funnel as we connect it to Amazon.com and we show you that we can drive that conversion and show you outcome,' which is amazing. And now what we're seeing is the rest of the broadcasters saying, 'We should be able to show that value too.' So we're so honored and excited to have first launched it with Paramount. So if you now go as an advertiser and you launch a campaign on TV, there's a performance option that allows you to say, 'I want to show my ad on TV, but I also want to get mid-to-low funnel metrics and conversions.' So that campaign, if you're seeing Yellowstone and you're seeing a pizza oven ad, a 30-second ad, and you're like, 'Huh, interesting,' and then later that day or later that week, you visit any one of the websites you love—Yahoo, NBC, ESPN, MLB, Nexstar, I mean, any one of those amazing publishers—you may see a relevant ad to that pizza oven ad you saw on TV. But more importantly, people like you. So this audience extension expansion also may see a pizza oven ad. So now the advertiser is getting lower acquisition costs and measurement and outcomes they expect when they usually work with a Meta or a Google, now they get it from TV. We announced it with LG in Q4 of last year. That's great. That's the first global TV integration we've done. LG is a global company, I think it's a quarter-billion devices around the world. And here at CES, I mean, I can tell you a lot of my meetings are with different retail media TV-type companies that say, 'We have something, we have special data. Can we build this retail media audience extension performance engine with you as we enter 2026?' So stay tuned. You know, BTV was always big on television-type initiatives, so I'm excited.