Taboola.com Ltd. (NASDAQ:TBLA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Stephen Walker: Sure, I’ll jump in on that one, Dan. So first of all, yes, there are detailed plans in place. I don’t want to get into too many specifics because it’s obviously getting into the weeds in terms of how we’re working with a key customer like Yahoo. But what I can say is, we’ve said all along that we would start migrating the advertisers in the back half of the year. You obviously all saw the announcement that the supply is now fully available through the Taboola platform. So that has started now. We’re making good progress. We feel good about where we’re at. I think Adam mentioned that, it’s really nice to hear stories of some of the advertisers that have migrated over and how they’re finding – having a good experience.

I heard about one advertiser just last – earlier this week or maybe it was late last week, it all boils together, but about how they are hitting the record levels of spend versus what they’ve ever done with Yahoo directly and in fact are now spending more with us than they are with Meta, which was kind of amazing to hear. So, I think so far progress is encouraging. Our sales teams have a plan that they’re executing on. I don’t want to get into all the specifics there, but we’re making good progress and we still feel very good about getting that fully migrated by middle of next year and being at full ramp starting in Q3.

Daniel Day: Great, thanks, Steve. Just the other one, we did hear yesterday from – here about revenue headwinds from an increase in publisher page views attributable because the war-related content advertisers blocking those for brand safety suitability reasons. Just making it more challenging to monetize those incremental page views. So just wondering if you guys have seen anything similar over the last few weeks?

Adam Singolda: Yes, I mean we obviously have business out of Israel. So about 10% of our revenue in Q3 came from Israel, but that revenue most of it is what we call export revenue, which is businesses, advertisers that are actually trying to reach consumers in other countries, U.S., U.K., wherever they are trying to reach those consumers, it’s not in Israel. And that tends to be much less affected by what’s going on. Only around 2% of our revenue is what we would consider domestic Israel revenue which is advertisers spending on Israeli publishers and because of that we’re not seeing a huge impact. And in fact, by the way on those publishers traffic is up revenue was down. So it kind of offsets itself somewhat. So it’s a small enough portion of our business that we’re really not seeing an impact overall in our business.

Obviously we’re monitoring pretty closely though because we need to see if it spreads are if anything more happens, but as of now, we’re not seeing a material impact.

Daniel Day: Okay, great, thanks guys.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Sergio Segura from KeyBanc. Mr. Segura, your line is now open.

Sergio Segura: Great, thank you. Good morning, Adam. Good morning, Steve. Two questions. First on Max Conversions, how broad has that adoption been? And how has that impacted net dollar retention for campaigns using it and when should we see for adoption of that product? And then for Taboola News, great progress towards the $100 million in revenue. How should we think about the drivers for the next $100 million revenue? Thank you.

Adam Singolda: I can start and, Steve, feel free to jump in. So on Max Conversion, first, it’s – like I said in my letter, it’s great to see the adoption. It’s about 30% now of our revenue has been adopted with Max Conversion which is, as a level set is one of our recent sophisticated AI that helps clients and advertisers share their business objective with us, but not have to provide a CPC, which is very common in ethic, but not common with Google and Facebook. So we’re now – we look more like a Google and Facebook from the advertiser point of view, and it’s our fastest growing adopted product since we started Taboola in 2007. But that’s, that’s pretty awesome to see. What’s good about it? It does affect NDR. I think we said this, I’ll let’s Steve check it, but I think we shared in our letter and press release some numbers, but it does affect NDR, so I will tell you advertisers, the course of clients who use AI in Max Conversion, they see better NDRs, as well as lower churn and these are kind of the leading – two leading indicators that we’re tracking to the company and we have aggressive goals to whether improving them.

So, and my expectation is that this will be – the majority of our revenue in 2024 will be driven by AI and Max Conversion, as well as the next iteration, which will be our rollout and that’s where advertisers can optimize for revenue as well, and not just conversions. So this is, this is as a whole roadmap into 2024. In fact, just before this call, I had an hour of course with our VP product on that and it’s very exciting to see what we’re trying to do. As it relates to Taboola News, there’s a bunch of things that were going there. First of all, it’s a great business on its own, because it helps our core business to get stronger and energetic. So if there’s is a win-win orientation there, we send traffic to our publishers, they grow audience, especially in times of the open web that could use more attention and in general, we’re growing that business in a few ways.

One, existing relationships with Xiaomi and Samsung and Oppo and Realme and others. We can get to more markets with them. So there is geography expansion and that’s going to help us get more users. The second thing is, get more touch points. So if you look at many of our OEMs today, they tend to work with us in one or two touch points, but not all of them at the same time. And there’s an opportunity there, so they might have us on the lock screen, they might have us in the minus one. They might have us in a notification when they send news to consumers. They might have us in the browser. But a lot of times, they’re just starting a certain integration and they grow it over time. So there is a whole vertical expansion opportunity with existing OEMs and how much more we can do with them.