Taboola Expands Beyond Native Ads with Realize

Taboola, a global leader in delivering performance at scale for advertisers, today (February 26th, 2025) announced a new focus beyond native advertising and a powerful new technology platform called Realize. 

Taboola has pioneered native advertising for more than a decade, driving success for advertisers, primarily in bottom of article placements. Today, Taboola extends far beyond this legacy with the introduction of Realize, an industry-first platform that specialises only in performance outcomes at scale beyond search and social. 

Realize taps into Taboola’s unique data, performance AI, and an increasingly diverse range of inventory and creative formats to achieve performance objectives. While advertisers need great solutions for all parts of the marketing funnel, they need specialised solutions. Existing solutions that promise full funnel service face significant challenges to excel in each part of the marketing funnel. As of today, Taboola is opening Realize for all advertisers focused on performance.

Taboola estimates that advertisers spend USD$25bn (£19.7bn) a year attempting to achieve performance outcomes on DSPs and niche ad tech solutions, yet in many cases these channels lack the performance expertise, scale or data to get the results advertisers need. DSPs tend to focus on video and CTV, which is great for branding goals but not performance, while ad tech companies tend to lack enough scale for success. Taboola estimates there is nearly USD$30bn (£23.7bn) of spend suffering from diminishing returns on social media. In addition, 75% of performance advertisers spending on social media say they are dealing with diminishing returns and are looking for solutions, due to audience saturation, rising costs and ad fatigue. In total, Taboola estimates that a majority of the USD$55bn (£33.4bn) being spent on performance advertising is not providing the ROI it could be. 

Realize is the only independent performance platform that goes beyond search and social media and delivers outcomes at scale for advertisers, leveraging Taboola’s unique supply, first-party data, and AI technology. It delivers simplicity and efficiency for advertisers to run performance-based campaigns on many of the world’s largest and most trusted publishers across all ad inventory, OEMs and apps. 

Key components of Realize include:

• New supply:  Going beyond “bottom of article” native
  For the first time ever, Realize allows advertisers to tap into display and even more parts of Taboola’s large network of publishers, apps, and OEMs which include NBC News, Yahoo, Xiaomi, and Samsung. Taboola advertisers can now go beyond native ad placements to connect with relevant customers in high visibility locations on many of the world’s most trusted publishers and apps to drive performance.
  
• AI & data advantage: Driving measurable results at scale
  Realize is powered by an AI performance engine that finds the best opportunities for campaigns across Taboola’s network of trusted publishers and apps. This AI performance engine is powered by the unique data advantage of Taboola’s code-on-page integrations with publishers, giving it more signal than any other open web platform to use when optimising and placing ads.
  
• Creative freedom: Getting started faster with social, display, vertical videos
  Realize provides an intuitive experience for performance advertisers, allowing them to now reach their customer acquisition goals with the same creative assets they use on display or social media campaigns. It transforms existing assets into high-performing ads across premium placements on leading publishers and apps, instantly.

“Every business deserves a chance to grow and succeed,” said Adam Singolda, CEO at Taboola. “Performance advertising beyond search and social media has been far too difficult for too long, however. Advertisers have settled on search and social media simply because there has been no viable alternative. Spending money with DSPs and CTV is great for branding but not optimised to drive performance, and running display with hundreds of advertising tech companies at low scale is simply not worth marketers’ time. Amazon started in 1994 and did a great job winning the book business by 2000, which allowed them to go into owning all of e-commerce. This is our “Amazon moment.” After many years of success with native ads, it's time to go after all of performance advertising. We can do a lot more for advertisers, and a lot more for publishers. Today is an exciting day for me and us at Taboola.”