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Taboola to go public at $2.6B valuation
- stewx 6y agoNice guys finish last.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BitwiseFool 6y ago>"Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations." Oh god no. If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity. >"While Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations, Singolda says the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation to ensure that every piece of content on its site is approved." I use uBlock Origin religiously, but from what I can tell most Taboola recommendations are the same 15 or so clickbait topics repeated ad infinitum. Woman mid shout, guy holding credit card, lotus fruit, some weird berry that's supposed to cure something, skin disorder, etc.
- impendia 6y agoIt seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you. I just hope that my new fridge will continue to keep my food cold after I smash the screen with a hammer.
- thedrbrian 6y agoDon’t do that. Use it as spare parts for a new project. When the screens do come out they’ll probably run some flavour of android so it might be flashable.
- rtkwe 6y agoI've just never connected my smart tv to the wifi to avoid that fate.
- eecc 6y agoDon’t, they’ll add some routine that makes you tap on some “agree” button and shut down the whole darn thing otherwise... I have an idea: under the perverse excuse of delivering firmware updates for your own network safety!!! Hmm, the plot of Brazil becomes every day more realistic. Ah, what times were living!
- umvi 6y agoWell hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.
- frakt0x90 6y agoThe urinal and gas station ones are right up the street from me and I don't visit either of those facilities anymore for that reason.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoMy corner gas station just rolled out new machines that start playing advertisements on the LCD screens as soon as the pump starts dispensing gas. It made me irrationally angry. One, that I have to deal with even more mental pollution in my daily life. And two, that the person who created this business model realized that pump-goers are quite literally a captive audience and that's the best way to force someone to watch an ad. I complained to the manager and I've never been back. Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.
- psadauskas 6y agoMost of the gas pumps with ads I’ve seen are the kind with 4 arrow buttons on either side. If you push the 2nd button down on the right side, it’ll mute the audio, and you can go back to listening to traffic and breathing fumes in peace. https://imgur.com/a/D7ZIR https://imgur.com/a/D7ZIR
- dylan604 6y agoThe hacker part of this website would investigate taking the LCD screen out, and repurposing it. We all know that DIY robot that goes to the fridge to bring you a snack will need some sort of LCD screen to act as an interface for you to choose the snack. It's not like we're going to use an iPad for that. We're too busy putting those in our cars.
- jostmey 6y agoIt will make people like us look crazy! People will walk into our homes and see smashed and covered ad-screens
- RankingMember 6y agoMy experience with modern refrigerators tells me that the fridge will likely _not_ continue to keep your food cold after the crappy display fails, whether by hammer or otherwise.
- reaperducer 6y agoIt seems this is the natural endgame, every refrigerator will come with an LCD screen on the front that advertises at you. Child's crayon drawing + magnet = problem solved.
- user22 6y agoFYI: pihole does not block taboola ads because they are not served from a separate network that can be filtered. You need to use a non-dns method of filtering them out
- manigandham 6y agoThe vast majority of these ads are rendered by JS from a third-party domain so they can be filtered out easily with DNS.
- hasperdi 6y agoOh yeah for sure you can block it using PiHole. Just add (^|\.)taboola\.com$ to your blacklist. Bonus: add (^|\.)outbrain\.com$ too while you’re at it.
- NortySpock 6y agoThanks for the reminder, just added it to my house-wide blocklist.
- mortenjorck 6y ago> If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity. I tend to think of something like this as more of a “move to a cabin in the woods” scenario, but I suppose that could be a workable compromise. In all seriousness, I’m morbidly curious as to how chumbox “technology” would apply to TV show and whatever kind of “content” recommendations would go on a smart fridge. Viscerally unsettling thumbnails that have tested for maximum conversion? Perfect for the kitchen!
- alexjplant 6y agoI thought it was an obscure regionalism for a refrigerator... that definition makes far more sense grammatically.
- ChrisRR 6y agoWho the hell would want clickbait ads streamed to their fridge? This is awful idea We're inching closer to the episode of Black Mirror where everyone is forced to stare at ads all day
- m4tthumphrey 6y agoOne step closer to 15 million merits [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
- asiachick 6y agoJust don't buy IoT devices that have ads (or period)?
- safog 6y agoIt'll eventually become the default. Every single new fridge will have a display. And that display will have ads.
- anonAndOn 6y ago"Kids, that ugly, old refrigerator without a screen sitting in the garage is worth a lot of money and is your inheritance."
- sjg007 6y agoAftermarket in old fridge doors. Unless they put DRM in to stop the compressor from running I'm not sure how they'd prevent it.
- elliekelly 6y agoMy fridge uses DRM to check the filter. I’m sure they won’t forget the doors. And I bet they’ll be attached via some obscure proprietary screwdriver head that’s unavailable to the public.
- ogre_codes 6y agoPeople like nice clean looking kitchens. A kitchen with a display flashing crap does not fit into that. I'm sure some percentage of fridges will have displays flashing shitty adverts all day long, but there will be a large number of fridges that are just decent looking boxes with stainless, black, or white doors. With TVs I'm afraid we're screwed though. Adding a brain and wifi to a TV is super cheap now and manufacturers have already figured out how to monetize having a smart TV in your house even without advertising.
- burnte 6y agoMy Samsung TV has built in ads, which I HATE. I want a dumb TV. Apps built into TVs generally suck because to keep the BOM cost down they put in the cheapest SoC that will function, leaving the apps sluggish, jerky, and frequently cut down in features. On my previous LG TV I couldn't turn off motion smoothing on the bui8lt in video streaming apps. With the Samsung TV I just don't connect it to the network because there are ads that you cannot disable.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThe ad industry is prepared for this. DNS-over-HTTPS will ignore your PiHole, and lovingly bring you ads anyways. While you can turn DoH off in your browser, your IoT device will not be so configurable. And will most likely fail to work entirely if you block access to Google's DoH endpoint. DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic, and by and large, the majority of tech enthusiasts have cheered for it.
- ryandrake 6y agoIt'll be an arms race. DNS-based blackholes would give way to IP-by-IP firewall rules. I remember when personal firewalls were mostly about blocking threats coming in through incoming connections. Now, I use mine more to block threats already on my network from exfiltrating through outgoing connections.
- burnte 6y ago1. DoH is a user configurable setting, it cannot be dictated by ad vendors or websites. 2. DoH fails back to standard DNS. 3. DoH is hard to filter, just like other TLS encrypted traffic. 4. DoH is a user FRIENDLY technology meant to increase user privacy and reduce DNS hijacking. 5. Don't like it? Turn it off. Only you have that power to enable or disable it.
- dredmorbius 6y agoDoH can be enforced by user-hostile devices and applications. Including Internet-of-shit infested appliances and devices. With 5G SIMS embedded and financed at rock-bottom mass-contract data-dribble rates via advertising, other revenue flow, or up-front / ongoing purchase revenue streams, WiFi LAN egress controls --- PiHole or other DNS blocklists, or IP and protocol firewalls --- simply won't be effective.
- ohazi 6y agoYou're confusing DoH in "friendly" browsers like Firefox, where you and I might deliberately turn it on to thwart ISP shenanigans. In that case, it's good that DoH is hard to filter and looks like all other TLS traffic. But the parent is correctly describing DoH as a double-edged sword. The same properties that make it good for you and me when trying to safely access domain data make it a weapon for rogue IoT devices who want to do the same. Your smart fridge could easily include software that allows it to acquire its own secure DNS info from a DoH network run by the smart fridge manufacturer. This would allow them to find the domains behind the chumbox ads that they want to show you in spite of your PiHole. Since the manufacturer would be doing this to get around a user's desired network configuration, it'll be configurable for them, not for you. You will not be the "owner" of this device.
- 650REDHAIR 6y agoI bought a Pi Zero W awhile back and it sat in my desk for like a year. While going through my desk about a month ago I decided to take 10 minutes to set it up and regret not doing it sooner! The little thing is pretty amazing. I've since moved the Pi Zero W to my travel bag paired with my travel modem and upgraded to a regular Pi at home!
- perardi 6y agoThe day my god-forsaken fridge presents me with a Taboola chumbox is the day I go full Amish and retire to a hut on my farmland in southern Illinois.
- jyriand 6y agoAre SPAC's some kind of new financial inventions? I see this term popping up quite frequently.
- loganfrederick 6y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/11/19/the-looming-spac-meltdown/?sh=77a98bf070d7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/11/19/the-loom...
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Are SPAC's some kind of new financial inventions? Relatively recent, yes. Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are a re-branding and evolution of the 1980s' blank cheque companies [1]. [1] https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1160&context=law_lawreview https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
- tylerrobinson 6y ago> A chumbox or chumbucket is a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages. This form of advertising is often associated with low quality "clickbait" links and articles. The term derives from the fishing practice of "chumming", the use of fish meat as a lure for fish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox This word is used in the article and while I’m quite familiar with the thing, I didn’t know it had a name. Very fitting for the low-quality content that it contains!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- estebarb 6y agoFor our own sanity I hope it gets shorted to zero...
- youngtaff 6y ago$2.6B worth of shite…
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoIf I had a top 5 list for who killed the internet I loved, this would be on it.
- u678u 6y agoI hate these ads as much as anyone else, but realistically these are one of the main competitors we're relying on to keep the web open and away from Google and Facebook right?
- manuelabeledo 6y agoWhile competition is good, do we really want this kind of competition? Google ads became popular precisely because they were light and non invasive. These quite aggressively take a chunk of the screen real estate, and sometimes are very disruptive, e.g. when they put them between articles and comments.
- 55555 6y agoNo they became popular because they paid publishers better because they had more data for targeting.
- ChrisRR 6y agoDo you want a giant douche or a turd sandwich?
- ev1 6y agoThey are arguably worse, more violating than both of those, and exclusively serve malware or fraud/unwanted porn/gore. At least I get actual brands on Google or Facebook, Taboola has absolutely nothing other than literal spam.
- llacb47 6y agoYou won't believe what this adtech clickfarm was valued at! The results will shock you!
- da_big_ghey 6y agoMoney managers hate him! This guy invested in the Taboola IPO and you won't believe what happened next!
- shreyshrey 6y agoSo how many will buy this stock (TBLA) thinking it is TSLA?
- 55555 6y agoPump your stock price with this one weird trick (Hint: it's lying). > He says the company's main competition is "anyone in business of offering software revenue tools to publishers," including CMS providers, email servers, etc. > Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations. > Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations
- finiteloops 6y agoFairly certain the "artificial intelligence" they're describing are the rotten brains of anyone who works for that company.
- ourcat 6y agoI'd say it's more like they're getting search data from Google. eg: I search on some medical condition (which I might or might not have) and the next thing I know, all Taboola 'chumbox' blocks are littered with 'ads' (which aren't ads that 'sell' anything) about said condition. Just extremely low quality links with zero value.
- creato 6y agoIt would be pretty shocking if Google were sharing search data with anyone, let alone Taboola. Others in this thread mentioned that Taboola used to have literal malware that would replace Google with a google-lookalike. Maybe you have that malware?
- gundmc 6y agoThat is not how Google works.
- ourcat 6y agoMaybe I should have said 'via' Google.
- fooblat 6y agoTaboola, Zergnet, Outbrain, and the like are half the reason I run a pihole. These companies and their ilk promote the worst of the worst of clickbait.
- yalogin 6y agoOh wow didn't know this is the company behind those annoying ads. On some sites, fivethirtyeight, its a infinite scroll list too. The worst thing I ever encountered. May be they fixed it now but it forced me to actually sign up for a fake email account and send an email to their staff about it. Its amazing that they are worth 2.4B dollars though. I get it that its used on almost every site but still seems a lot. Our estimates of value have been severely distorted by the last year. Not sure if things will ever go down or if its the new normal.
- flixic 6y agoCan't wait for their S-1 filing. For a business as distasteful as this, there should be quite a few gems and interesting risks.
- rattray 6y agoI don't think there will be one, since they're doing a SPAC merger. They're not doing an IPO, but rather merging with an empty holding company that's already done one.
- r00fus 6y agoIs that a common exploit for going public?
- rattray 6y agoYes, increasingly so. The froth of 2020 has led to a big increase in the use of SPACs, despite them previously being viewed as super sketchy. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp
- perardi 6y agoAhhhh, wonderful, joining the eminent, definitely not a scam at all, no sir, firms like Nikola Motors.
- pradn 6y agoI am being harsh, but this company is the equivalent of a chemical company that poisons the river. Sure, there's a benefit of revenue for publishers (powering journalism and other writing / photography / video), but it's so obnoxious and no where near anyone's idea of a worthwhile content. It's like praising litter for having been the product of a sale, benefiting whoever.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y agoI like this analogy a lot. Nature has a special place for us so conservation is (mostly) obvious, including ideas like negative externalities. But I agree with you that we should be thinking of the online world in the same way, even if its not as existential as a clean environment. Companies that profit by destroying the value of the web, like Taboola and other listicle or content farms should be held accountable for lowering the internet's quality for everyone.
- samdung 6y agoan interesting reading on the economics of chumbox ads: https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-c...
- rattray 6y agoThis was interesting, but didn't go deep enough - where do all these ads ultimately lead to $$ transactions? Do they only end up selling legit products that are advertised non-manipulatively, like the hearing aids?
- arcturus17 6y agoTaboola and Outbrain have disgusting products. Their recommendations lead to content that is sketchy at best, and their business model is to pry on the unsuspecting at scale. I would say there is no harm done in wasting people's time here and there, but I bet they're hyper-agressive in data collection and privacy violations. These types of companies are the very definition of extractive elite: they provide close to nothing of value and yet soak up a bunch of profits in the hands of a few. I'd be happy to hear someone refute my claims, especially the latter.
- sjg007 6y agoI don't know how they make money...
- ceejayoz 6y agoThey embed their ads on news sites, style them to look like legitimate articles, and prey on the vulnerable. Same methodology as the "your Social Security number has been suspended" scam calls.
- tartoran 6y agoWho pays to have their ads displayed by a chumbox? Probably smaller players but I can't imagine a reputable company to post ads in that toxic environment, it really does look bad.
- joering2 6y agoSmaller players? I know a "small" biz that does $45,000 a day with Taboola. They do it because sadly their scammy ads work on vulnerable population.
- dredmorbius 6y agoMajor new sites, mostly magazine publishers, were doing this. Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, and CNN as I recall. Five-thirt-eight according to comments here. Some may have dropped them by now, many were discussing this as negative brand value within recent years. Previous discussion: https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-c... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20409693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20409693) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-advertising-chumbox-merger.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-adv... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175145)
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoI don't see taboola chumboxes with ublock on the "block all" setting, with FF, and gradually allow JS elements if needed. I used to like doing this with NoScript. Sometimes I have to change browser for banking or specific shopping, and I have separate (non uBlock) browsers that i use strictly for work. Reading the high level dislike of taboola, I wonder what is preventing people from using uBlock to zap Taboola?
- gorhill 6y agoTaboola is blocked by default in uBlock Origin.
- projektfu 6y agoI still don't understand why publishers use these ads. At best they annoy your readers. At worst people leave your site and give revenue or eyeballs somewhere else. Since publishers are in the impression business, shouldn't they be selling ads that make revenue by impression instead of by click? My dream is for publishers to wise up suddenly, leaving Taboola and its underwriters holding the bag.
- ogre_codes 6y agoAt best someone accidentally clicks on one of the little adverts and you earn $0.01. On a busy site, accidental clicks alone have to earn a few dollars a day.
- ceejayoz 6y agoAt the risk of your site's reputation, of course.
- celestialcheese 6y agoFor big sites, you can negotiate 80% revshare + guaranteed minimums. This is huge for smoothing out cash-flow in low CPM quarters and is one of the most valuable ad slots available to pubs
- cmorgan31 6y agoThey pay you a promised amount to clutter your website with their horseshit beyond a certain point because your data becomes the commodity being bought just not transparently. Now make the case constantly to get rid of the free cash by showing it's negative impact on brand and revenue. I hope that one day they are all gone but it will be awhile still...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoDoes anyone on HN actually LIKE taboos/outbrain recommendations? I hide them with ublock origin and completely ignore the ones that slip through.
- alibrarydweller 6y agoIn case it's not obvious, Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data. If a browser goes to ten sites which have Taboola boxes on them, then Taboola can sell the history of that cookie and its browsing history to a targeting company. If the targeting company has a cookie of its own in the same place as a chumbox then the company is able to map everything Taboola knows to everything they know. Given the efforts of Apple, Google and Mozilla to choke off this type of tech (third party cookie tracking) it's interesting their valuation is this high. I guess they can still make much of counting anonymous visits and mapping them back to IPs for sale.
- lopatin 6y agoNot that they don't do this but I'm not sure selling data is their main source of money. I think their ad placements are actually that valuable. Click-bait sells extremely well when it's manipulative enough and displayed to a wealthy demographic. About 10 years ago you would pay $.1 to $1 for a click from a soccer mom on Fox News. That's not search ads, that $1 per non-targeted display ad click. Which was insane back then, not sure now. I've also not touched ads for a decade so maybe I'm just behind the times. Edit: I actually credit Taboola and Outbrain with being the enablers of actual "fake news". There was a time when you could make a landing page that looks like the NYT, put an "advertisement" disclaimer in gray letters and 9pt font somewhere, and blast it on Taboola so people buy your supplements. Taboola was fully aware, just loved the money too much.
- namdnay 6y ago> Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data Where did you get this from? Have they published the relative revenues?
- whoisjuan 6y ago"5 signs that you're about to have stroke"... Shows a photo of something common like someone scratching their arm. Taboola is the lowest of the lowest when it comes to advertising. 100% pure trash.
- guyzero 6y agoPeople complain about Google but Taboola is a hundred times more toxic with their garbage ads cluttering up the bottom half of so many media sites' pages. Being shown the same ad for shoes a hundred times the day after I bought them is nothing next to shock-image ads into content farms.
- bserge 6y ago> the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation I just can't help but laugh at this. Over 50 people, so likely under 60. For a company serving 500 million daily active users and 1 trillion aids/month... Just comedy gold. And these people are on minimum wage, and we don't even know in what country. Churn rate ~90%/month. But that's just a side joke. This is what people value, middlemen trading trash for cash. $2.6 billion, fuck my whole life.
- schwinn140 6y agoTaboola, Outbrain, et al are the bottom of the barrel as it relates to the space of monetized and amplified content recommendations. Literal clickbait designed to pray on the poorly informed. From an advertising perspective, their targeting "AI" is nonsense. The fact that they are cashing out isn't upsetting. The fact that countless, I would assume tens of millions of users, have been duped to click on this drudge is most disheartening.
- tartoran 6y agoHonestly I'd be embarrassed if I were an engineer working for taboola/outbrain. It's a job yes, but I wouldn't advertise it to my friends at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rattray 6y agoIt seems to me that services like Taboola are something like manipulation-laundering services, providing enough room between deception and a product sold to circumvent the FTC's truth in advertising rules. Could someone with more knowledge comment - is that at all right? Is there more to it? Could rule tweaks at the FTC have an impact on this?
- russellbeattie 6y agoIf there is any company in the world that should be burned to the ground for the sake of all humanity, Taboola is definitely one of them. Outbrain is the other. I wish they had actually merged to save us the time of destroying both. Their product is horrible and without redemption. But let me make it clear that the people that work there are also as horrible - try criticizing them on Twitter and watch the bots and employees attack. They provide nothing of any value in any way whatsoever. It's pure scam. If they disappeared tomorrow the world would literally become a better place in real, measurable ways. I've had a PiHole set up for years explicitly to block them. No other service I can imagine is built on such lies, falsehoods, deceit and fraud. They are pure garbage. Hatred doesn't even begin to describe my antipathy towards them. Taboola employees reading this? You're all trash.
- dredmorbius 6y agoTaboola and Outbrain were nearly the same company. A merger announced in 2019 fell through. Invalidating my "Save a match with this one weird trick!" joke. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-advertising-chumbox-merger.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/business/media/online-adv... (I'd not read the update in the Axios article initially, apologies, and edited.)
- russellbeattie 6y agoI had to do the same thing with my comment, actually. The deal just fell apart in September apparently. We'll just have to use two matches. "15 ways that fire bombing trash ad companies will improve our lives. Number 10 will shock you!"
- gundmc 6y agoIt's not an exaggeration to say that my opinion of a site drops dramatically when I see a trashy Tabula feed. I'm looking at you, Fivethirtyeight.
- KoftaBob 6y agoTaboola and Outbrain are both purveyors of absolute garbage clickbait ads of the lowest quality. The founders of those two companies are the modern day version of snake oil salesmen, and they know it. They probably don't care, since they're clearly motivated purely by greed, not by any sense of pride in what they're building. I don't normally have opinions this strong about a company, but man do they take pride in insulting the intelligence of every user who sees their ads.
- whalesalad 6y agoIt is remarkable to me that a company that produces so little value to the consumer is worth SO much. There is a LOT of cash to be made in the dark-pattern cracks of society.
- r00fus 6y agoPossibly because digital policy doesn't seem to move quickly in the US. Taboola only exists because we don't have effective consumer policy and that's because we have a dysfunctional political system.
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- KoftaBob 6y ago"When the founders look back at their life and see "litter the internet with garbage" as their biggest accomplishment, I wonder if the money will be worth it."
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- Mc_Big_G 6y agoProving yet again that anyone can get rich as long as they don't have any morals.
- erostrate 6y agoTaboola relies on the open web for its existence, but by littering it with their garbage for a quick buck they are contributing to drive people towards walled gardens. It's a self-destructive company. It reminds me of this fishing technique where they scrape the whole ocean floor with huge nets, slowly destroying the whole ecosystem in order to get a few more low quality fish.
- cblconfederate 6y agoTaboola's content is trash, but people should consider why it is so: Google&FB have destroyed the ad industry so much that only this kind of predatory behavior can survive.
- deeviant 6y agoIs their plan to lure some investors into paying $2.6B for them to go away forever, for the betterment of mankind? /s
- kgc 6y agoTaboola is the scum of the internet. Their ads are all clickbait.
- Jordrok 6y agoJust adding to the dogpile here, but Taboola and Outbrain are the absolute scum of the Earth. Google, Facebook, and others get a lot of justified criticism for abusive business practices and invasion of privacy, but at least they also provide some kind of arguably valuable service in return. Taboola and Outbrain on the other hand are malignant parasites, utterly devoid of any imaginable redeeming qualities. If I could flip a switch and erase both companies from existence, I would absolutely do it without a moment's hesitation.