Taboola, the provider of digital advertising space that regularly appears at the bottom of websites, is moving to the stock market. The company announced Monday it will do so via the preferred public vehicle of our age: a special procurement company (SPAC).
Taboola’s current business will be parked in the SPAC, an existing stock called ION Acquisition Corp 1 Bpk. (NYSE: IACA), and thus became an exchange-traded company.
The deal is expected to end in the second quarter, Taboola said. The resulting entity will do business under the current name, and the tick must change to TBLA.
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Taboola said the merger with ION would yield a total return of $ 545 million between the funds held by ION in trust and investments by third parties. According to Taboola, the merged entity is valued at about $ 2.6 billion. The company said it would spend more than $ 100 million on research and growth opportunities. It does not contain details about other spending purposes.
As a private company, Taboola does not provide much detail about its finances. The current public announcement on its website states that its revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, will amount to $ 379 million in 2020. Operating profit was $ 34 million and adjusted EBITDA (earnings before income, tax, depreciation and amortization) to $ 100 million. A final figure was not provided.
In its words, Taboola ‘enables digital owners to leverage the value of AI-driven recommendations and provides advertisers with a way to effectively access users on the open Internet.’
It is estimated that the size of what it describes as ‘the highly fragmented open web advertising market’ was around $ 64 billion last year.