The selling securityholders named in this prospectus (the “Selling Securityholders”) may offer and sell from time to time up to 28,620,000 of our ordinary shares, no par value per share purchased in a private placement in connection with our Business Combination, and warrants (“private placement warrants”) to purchase up to 7,175,000 ordinary shares issued in a private placement to ION Holdings 1, LP and ION Co-Investment LLC (the “Sponsors”).

In addition, this prospectus relates to the issuance by us of up to 5,175,000 ordinary shares that are issuable by us upon the exercise of the public warrants (as defined below), which were previously registered, and up to 7,175,000 ordinary shares underlying private placement warrants.

The Selling Securityholders may offer, sell or distribute all or a portion of the securities hereby registered publicly or through private transactions at prevailing market prices or at negotiated prices. We will not receive any of the proceeds from such sales of the ordinary shares or warrants, except with respect to amounts received by us upon the exercise of the warrants. We will bear all costs, expenses and fees in connection with the registration of these securities, including with regard to compliance with state securities or “blue sky” laws. The Selling Securityholders will bear all commissions and discounts, if any, attributable to their sale of ordinary shares or warrants. See “Plan of Distribution.”

Our ordinary shares and warrants are listed on The Nasdaq Global Market under the symbols “TBLA” and “TBLAW”, respectively. On September 28, 2021, the last reported sales price of our ordinary shares was $8.90 per share and the last reported sales price of our warrants was $1.95 per warrant.

Investing in our securities involves a high degree of risk. You should review carefully the risks and uncertainties described under the heading “Risk Factors” beginning on page 9 of this prospectus, and under similar headings in any amendment or supplements to this prospectus.

Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any state securities commission has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the adequacy or accuracy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense.

No one has been authorized to provide you with information that is different from that contained in this prospectus. This prospectus is dated as of the date set forth on the cover hereof. You should not assume that the information contained in this prospectus is accurate as of any date other than that date.

For investors outside the United States: We have not done anything that would permit this offering or possession or distribution of this prospectus in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required, other than in the United States. You are required to inform yourselves about and to observe any restrictions relating to this offering and the distribution of this prospectus.

Unless otherwise stated or unless the context otherwise requires, the terms “Company,” “the registrant,” “our company,” “the company,” “we,” “us,” “our,” “ours,” and “Taboola” refer to Taboola.com Ltd., a company organized under the laws of the State of Israel. In this prospectus:

“Board” means the board of directors of ION.

“Business Combination” means the merger pursuant to the Merger Agreement, whereby Merger Sub merged with and into ION, with ION surviving the merger, and the other transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement.

“Class A Ordinary Shares” means each Class A ordinary share of ION, par value $0.0001 per share. All Class A common stock was reclassified as Taboola Ordinary Shares upon the consummation of the Business Combination.

“Class B Ordinary Shares” means each Class B ordinary share of ION, par value $0.0001 per share. All Class B common stock was reclassified as Taboola Ordinary Shares upon the consummation of the Business Combination.

“Effective Time” means the effective time of the closing of the Business Combination.

“Founder Shares” means 6,468,750 Class B Ordinary Shares purchased by the Sponsors, directors and executive officers of ION for an aggregate of $25,000 (including the 718,750 Class B Ordinary Shares issued to the Founders in connection with the share capitalization effected on October 1, 2020), which immediately prior to the Effective Time automatically converted into 6,468,750 Class A Ordinary Shares.

“Investors’ Rights Agreement” means the Amended and Restated Investors’ Rights Agreement, effective as of the Effective Time, pursuant to which each of the Sponsors, and certain of Taboola’s shareholders were granted certain resale registration rights with respect to any Taboola Ordinary Shares or Taboola Warrants.

“ION” means ION Acquisition Corp. 1 Ltd., a Cayman Islands exempted company.

“ION Ordinary Shares” means Class A Ordinary Shares and Class B Ordinary Shares.

“ION Unit” means each issued and outstanding unit of ION, consisting of one Class A Ordinary Share and one-fifth of one ION Warrant.

“ION Warrants” means each warrant of ION entitling the holder to purchase one Class A Ordinary Shares per warrant at a price of $11.50 per share.

“Merger Agreement” means the agreement and plan of merger, dated as of January 25, 2021, by and among ION, Taboola and Merger Sub.

“Merger Sub” means Toronto Sub Ltd., a Cayman Islands exempted company and wholly owned subsidiary of the Company.

“PIPE” means the entry by the PIPE Investors into the Subscription Agreements.

“PIPE Investment” means the commitment by the PIPE Investors to purchase an aggregate of 13,500,000 PIPE Shares from Taboola at a price per share of $10.00, for gross proceeds to Taboola of $135,000,000.

“PIPE Investors” means certain accredited investors that entered into the Subscription Agreements providing for the purchase of an aggregate of 13,500,000 PIPE Shares at a price per share of $10.00.

“PIPE Shares” means an aggregate of 13,500,000 Taboola Ordinary Shares to be purchased by the PIPE Investors pursuant to the Subscription Agreements at a price per share of $10.00.

“Secondary Investors” means certain accredited investors that entered into the Secondary Purchase Agreements providing for the purchase of an aggregate of up to 15,120,000 Secondary Shares at a price per share of $10.00.

“Secondary Purchase Agreements” means the purchase agreements entered into by the Secondary Investors providing for the purchase by the Secondary Investors at the Effective Time of an aggregate of up to 15,120,000 Secondary Shares at a price per share of $10.00.

“Secondary Purchases” means the commitment by the Secondary Investors to purchase Taboola Ordinary Shares from certain employees and shareholders of Taboola, and, under certain circumstances, from Taboola, in an aggregate of 15,120,000 Secondary Shares at a price per share of $10.00, for gross proceeds of $151,200,000.

“Secondary Shares” mean an aggregate of up to 15,120,000 Taboola Ordinary Shares to be purchased by the Secondary Investors pursuant to the Secondary Purchase Agreements at a price per share of $10.00.

“Sponsor Support Agreement” means the agreement pursuant to which the Sponsors agreed to undertake certain actions in support of the Business Combination, including, but not limited to, delivering a voting proxy pursuant to which the Sponsors voted in favor of the proposals presented for approval herein.

“Sponsors” means ION Holdings 1, LP and ION Co-Investment LLC.

“Stock Split” means the forward stock split to cause the value of the outstanding Taboola Ordinary Shares immediately prior to the Effective Time to equal $10.00 per share.

“Subscription Agreements” means the subscription agreements entered into by the PIPE Investors providing for the purchase by the PIPE Investors at the Effective Time of an aggregate of 13,500,000 PIPE Shares at a price per share of $10.00.

“Taboola” means Taboola.com Ltd., a company organized under the laws of the State of Israel.

“Taboola Ordinary Shares” means each ordinary share of Taboola, no par value per share.

“Taboola Warrant” means a warrant of Taboola issued to ION Warrant holders and the Taboola Ordinary Shares underlying such warrants.

“Transactions” means the Business Combination and the other transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement.

Certain statements in this registration statement/prospectus may constitute “forward-looking statements” for purposes of the federal securities laws. Taboola’s forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Taboola or its management team’s expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. In addition, any statements that refer to projections, forecasts or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, are forward-looking statements. The words “anticipate,” “appear,” “approximate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “foresee,” “intends,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “possible,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “seek,” “should,” “would” and similar expressions (or the negative version of such words or expressions) may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. Forward-looking statements in this registration statement/prospectus may include, for example, statements about:

These forward-looking statements are based on information available as of the date of this registration statement/prospectus, and current expectations, forecasts and assumptions, and involve a number of judgments, risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date they were made, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. As a result of a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties, our actual results or performance may be materially different from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Some factors that could cause actual results to differ include:

An investment in our securities involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks described below before making an investment decision. Our business, prospects, financial condition, or operating results could be harmed by any of these risks, as well as other risks not known to us or that we consider immaterial as of the date of this prospectus. The trading price of our securities could decline due to any of these risks, and, as a result, you may lose all or part of your investment.

We must add new digital properties and advertisers, and encourage existing digital properties and advertisers to add additional offerings from us, in order to sustain or increase our revenue. As the digital advertising industry matures and as competitors introduce more competitive pricing or differentiated products or services that compete with or are perceived to compete with ours, our ability to sell our solutions to new and existing digital properties and advertisers could be impaired. In addition, we may reach a point of saturation at which we cannot continue to grow our revenue from existing digital properties and advertisers because of internal limits they may place on the allocation of space on their sites, allocation of their advertising budgets to digital media, to particular campaigns, to a particular provider, or other reasons. We may also lose revenues if our existing digital properties and advertisers reduce the amount of business they do with us for any reason, including nonrenewal of their agreements with us. If we are unable to attract new digital properties and advertisers or obtain new business from existing digital properties and advertisers or maintain enough business with our existing digital properties and advertisers, our revenue, our revenue growth prospects and business will be adversely affected.

A significant amount of our revenue comes from contracts with digital properties where we are obligated to pay a specified minimum guaranteed amount per thousand impressions to the digital property. In each of the years ended December 31, 2018 through 2020, our guarantee costs, which we calculate as total payments due under guarantee arrangements in excess of amounts we otherwise would have been required to pay under revenue sharing arrangements, as a percentage of our total payments to digital properties, or TAC, was approximately 15% or less. Although we focus on achieving sufficient revenue per impression through the improvement of our algorithms and using our scale to exceed the minimum guarantees made to digital properties, we may not succeed in doing so. In addition, due to unfavorable macroeconomic, competitive or other conditions, we may be unable to perform as expected under arrangements that provide for such minimum guarantees, in which case our gross profit could be negatively impacted and our results of operation and financial condition could be adversely affected.

Competition for our clients’ advertising budgets is intense. We compete for a share of total advertising budgets with online search and display advertising, including large “walled garden” advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook, and with traditional advertising media, such as direct mail, television, radio, cable and print. Many current and potential competitors have competitive advantages relative to us, such as longer operating histories, greater name recognition, larger client bases, greater access to advertising inventory on premium websites and significantly greater financial, technical, sales and marketing resources. Thus, increased competition may result in the loss of business or the inability to win new business, which could negatively affect our revenue and future operating results and our ability to grow our business.

We also expect competition on the digital property side to continue increasing as the industry grows. Increased competition may require us to increase the revenue share with our digital properties, charge less for our solutions, or offer other pricing models that are less attractive to us, any of which could decrease our revenues and margins and harm our results of operations.

Our future success depends on our ability to effectively scale our offerings as our business grows to keep pace with demand for our solutions, and achieve long-term profitability. If we fail to implement these changes on a timely basis, or if we are unable to implement them effectively or at all due to factors beyond our control or other reasons, our business may suffer. We may not be successful in addressing these and other challenges we may face in the future. As a growing company in a rapidly evolving industry, our business prospects depend in large part on our ability to:

If we are unable to meet one or more of these objectives or otherwise adequately address the risks and difficulties that we face, our business may suffer, our revenue may decline and we may not be able to achieve further growth or long-term profitability.

Our business has grown rapidly. We rely heavily on information technology, or IT, systems to manage critical functions such as content recommendation, campaign management and operations, payment from advertisers and to digital properties, data storage and retrieval, revenue recognition, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting and other administrative functions. To manage our growth effectively, we must continue to improve and expand our infrastructure, including our IT, financial and administrative systems and controls. We must also continue to manage our employees, operations, finances, research and development and capital investments efficiently. Our productivity and the quality of our platform may be adversely affected if we do not integrate and train our new employees, particularly our research and development, sales and account management personnel, quickly and effectively and if we fail to appropriately coordinate across our executive, finance, human resources, legal, marketing, sales, operations and advertiser support teams. If we continue our rapid growth, we will incur additional expenses, and our growth may place a strain on our resources, infrastructure and ability to maintain the quality of our platform. If we do not adapt to meet these evolving growth challenges, and if the current and future members of our management team do not effectively scale with our growth, the quality of our platform may suffer and our corporate culture may be harmed. Failure to manage our future growth effectively could cause our business to suffer, which, in turn, could have an adverse impact on our financial condition and results of operations.

Our industry is subject to rapid changes in standards, regulations, technologies, products and service offerings, as well as in digital property and advertiser demands and expectations. We continuously need to make decisions regarding which offerings and technology to invest in to meet such demands and evolving industry standards and regulatory requirements. We may make wrong decisions regarding these investments. If new or existing competitors

offer more attractive offerings, we may lose digital property and/or advertisers, or advertisers may decrease their spending on our platform. New digital property or advertiser demands, superior competitive offerings, new industry standards or regulations could render our existing solutions unattractive, unmarketable or obsolete and require us to make substantial unanticipated changes to our technology platform or business model. Our failure to adapt to a rapidly changing market or to anticipate digital property and/or advertiser demands could harm our business and our financial performance.

Our quarterly and annual operating results have fluctuated significantly in the past. Similarly, we expect our future operating results to fluctuate for the foreseeable future due to a variety of factors, many of which are beyond our control. Our fluctuating results could cause our performance to fall below the expectations of investors, and adversely affect the price of our ordinary shares. Because our business is changing and evolving rapidly, our historical operating results may not be useful in predicting our future operating results and it is difficult for us to accurately predict future results. In addition, our rapid growth has limited our ability to reliably track key business metrics and so we have limited understanding of certain aspects of our operations. For example, we do not have good visibility into the seasonality of our business due to the fact that our rapid growth may have masked seasonality. Factors that may increase the volatility of our operating results include the following:

Based upon all of the factors described above and others that we may not anticipate, including those beyond our control, we have a limited ability to forecast our future revenue, costs and expenses. As a result, our operating results may from time to time fall below our estimates or the expectations of investors.

We use “cookies” (small text files) to gather important data to help deliver our solutions. These cookies are placed through an Internet browser on an Internet user’s computer and correspond to a data set that we keep on our servers. Some of our cookies are “third party” cookies where we do not have a direct relationship with the Internet user. Our cookies collect information, such as when an Internet user views an internet site, clicks on an ad, or visits one of our digital properties. We use these cookies to help us achieve our digital property or advertisers’ campaign goals, to help us ensure that the same Internet user does not unintentionally see the same recommendations too

frequently, to report aggregate information to our advertisers regarding the performance of their campaigns and to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. We also use data from cookies to help us decide on an opportunity to place a recommendation in a certain location, at a given time, in front of a particular Internet user. A lack of data associated with cookies may detract from our ability to make decisions about an advertiser’s campaign, and undermine the effectiveness of our solutions.

Cookies may easily be deleted or blocked by Internet users. All of the most commonly used Internet browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge and Safari) allow Internet users to prevent cookies from being accepted by their browsers. Internet users can also delete cookies from their computers at any time. Some Internet users also download “ad blocking” software that prevents cookies from being stored on a user’s computer. If more Internet users adopt these settings or delete their cookies more frequently than they currently do, our business could be harmed. Recently, there has been a general trend among Internet users to refuse to accept cookies on their Internet browsers. In addition, the Safari, Firefox and Edge browsers block cookies by default, and other browsers may do so in the future. Unless such default settings in browsers were altered by Internet users, we would be able to set fewer of our cookies in browsers, which could adversely affect our business. In addition, companies such as Google have publicly disclosed their intention to move away from cookies to another form of persistent unique identifier, or ID, to indicate Internet users in the bidding process on advertising exchanges. If such companies do not use shared IDs across the entire digital advertising ecosystem, this could have a negative impact on our ability to find the same anonymous user across different web properties, and reduce the effectiveness of our solutions. These web browser developers have significant resources at their disposal and command substantial market share, and any restrictions they impose could foreclose our ability to understand the preferences of a substantial number of consumers.

In addition, in the European Union, or EU, Directive 2009/136/EC, commonly referred to as the “Cookie Directive,” directs EU member states to ensure that accessing information on an Internet user’s computer, such as through a cookie, is allowed only if the Internet user has given his or her consent. As there were different transpositions of the Cookie Directive in domestic laws across the EU Member States, there are currently different interpretations of what constitutes valid consent (e.g., explicit versus implied consent) across the EU, posing a risk of regulatory divergence and creating legal uncertainty for businesses. The EU also has released a proposed replacement to the Cookie Directive, commonly known as the “ePrivacy Regulation,” to, among other things, better align EU member states and the rules governing online tracking technologies and electronic communications, such as unsolicited marketing and cookies, with the requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While the ePrivacy Regulation was originally intended to be adopted on May 25, 2018 (alongside the GDPR), it is currently going through the European legislative process, and commentators now expect it to be adopted in the coming years. Like the GDPR, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation has extra-territorial application as it applies to businesses established outside the EU who provide publicly-available electronic communications services to, or gather data from the devices of, users in the EU. The ePrivacy Regulation may impose burdensome requirements around obtaining consent and impose fines for violations that are materially higher than those imposed under the European Union’s current ePrivacy Directive and related EU member state legislation. Additionally, the use of cookies, as well as the use of the data collected using cookies, may be subject to further legislation or regulation. The United States and other governments have enacted or are considering legislation that regulate the level of consumer notice and consent required before a company can employ cookies or other electronic tracking tools.

Limitations on the use or effectiveness of cookies, or other limitations on our ability to collect and use data for advertising, whether imposed by EU member state implementations of the Cookie Directive, by the new ePrivacy Regulation, or otherwise, may impact the performance of our platform. We may be required to, or otherwise may determine that it is advisable to, make significant changes in our business operations and product and services to obtain user opt-in for cookies and use of cookie data, or develop or obtain additional tools and technologies to compensate for a lack of cookie data. We may not be able to make the necessary changes in our business operations and products and services to obtain user opt-in for cookies and use of cookie data, or develop, implement or acquire additional tools that compensate for the lack of data associated with cookies. Moreover, even if we are able to do so, such additional products and tools may be subject to further legislation or regulation, time consuming to develop or costly to obtain, and less effective than our current use of cookies.

The efficacy of our platform for both advertisers and digital properties relies, in part, on our ability to personalize the recommendations we serve to Internet users. If we are unable to personalize due to changes in various privacy regulations or for some other reason beyond our control, the efficacy of our platform may be negatively affected causing our business to suffer, which, in turn, could have an adverse impact on our financial condition, results of operations and revenues.

The effective delivery of our solution depends on the ability of Taboola’s AI powered platform to predict what ads and content would be of most interest to users so that our advertisers can achieve desirable returns on their advertising spend. We need to continuously deliver satisfactory results for our advertisers and digital properties in terms of predicting user engagement and conversion rates in order to maintain and increase revenue, which in turn depends in part on the optimal functioning of Taboola’s AI powered platform. In addition, as we have increased the number of advertisers and digital properties that use our offerings on a global basis, we have experienced significant growth in the amount and complexity of data processed by Taboola’s AI and the number of ad and content impressions we deliver. As the amount of data and number of variables processed by Taboola’s AI powered platform increase, the risk of errors in the type of data collected, stored, generated or accessed also increases. In addition, the calculations that the algorithms must compute become increasingly complex and the likelihood of any defects or errors increases. If we were to experience significant errors or defects in Taboola’s AI powered platform, our solution could be impaired or stop working altogether, which could prevent us from generating any revenue until the errors or defects were detected and corrected. Other negative consequences from significant errors or defects in Taboola’s AI powered platform could include:

Furthermore, the ability of Taboola’s AI powered platform to accurately predict engagement by a user depends in part on our ability to continuously innovate and improve the algorithms underlying Taboola’s AI powered platform in order to deliver positive results for our advertisers and digital properties that can be clearly attributed to the services we provide. The failure to do so could result in delivering poor performance for our advertisers and a reduced ability to secure advertising inventory. If failures in Taboola’s AI powered platform or our inability to innovate and improve the algorithms underlying Taboola’s AI powered platform result in advertisers and digital properties ceasing to partner with us, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to replace, in a timely or effective manner, departing advertisers with new advertisers that generate comparable revenue or departing digital properties with new digital properties. As a result, the failure by Taboola’s AI powered platform to accurately predict user engagement or conversion rates and to continue to do so over time could result in significant costs to us and our results of operation and financial condition could be adversely affected.

Our ability to sustain continued engagement by users who interact with our platform on various digital properties depends on our ability to continue to provide attractive content to users. If users begin to ignore our platform or direct their attention to other elements on the digital property, our performance could decline and digital property and advertiser satisfaction with our platform may decrease. Technological and other developments may also cause changes in consumer behavior that could affect the attractiveness of our content and ads to users.

While we have adopted a number of strategies and initiatives to address these challenges, there can be no guarantee that our efforts will be successful. If we are unable to demonstrate the continuing value of our platform to advertisers and digital properties, our results may suffer. A decrease in advertising expenditures by our advertisers could lead to a reduction in our ability to obtain high-quality content from digital properties, which in turn could have an adverse effect on our results of operations and revenues.

Our business and operations have been and could in the future be adversely affected by health epidemics, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to control its spread have curtailed the movement of people, goods and services worldwide, including in the regions in which we and our clients and partners operate, and are significantly impacting economic activity and financial markets. Many marketers have decreased or paused their advertising spending as a response to the economic uncertainty, decline in business activity, and other COVID-related impacts, which have negatively impacted, and may continue to negatively impact, our revenue and results of operations, the extent and duration of which we may not be able to accurately predict. For instance, we experienced a notable decline in advertising rates soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we attribute a 12% reduction in our second quarter of 2020 revenue to the pandemic. We took certain steps to address the reduction in advertising rates, which resulted in a gradual recovery in revenue that continued throughout the remainder of the year. See “Taboola's Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Factors and Trends Affecting our Performance—Impact of COVID-19.” In addition, our advertisers’ businesses or cash flows have been and may continue to be negatively impacted by COVID-19, which has and may continue to lead them to seek adjustments to payment terms or delay making payments or default on their payables, any of which may impact the timely receipt and/or collectability of our receivables.

Our operations are subject to a range of external factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic that are not within our control. We have taken precautionary measures intended to minimize the risk of the spread of the virus to our employees, partners and clients, and the communities in which we operate. A wide range of governmental restrictions has also been imposed on our employees’ and clients’ physical movement to limit the spread of COVID-19. There can be no assurance that precautionary measures, whether adopted by us or imposed by others, will be effective, and such measures could negatively affect our sales, marketing, and client service efforts, delay and lengthen our sales cycles, decrease our employees’ and clients’ productivity, or create operational or other challenges, any of which could harm our business and results of operations.

The economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may continue to make it difficult for us to forecast revenue and operating results and to make decisions regarding operational cost structures and investments. We have committed, and we plan to continue to commit, resources to grow our business, including to expand our international presence, employee base, and technology development, and such investments may not yield anticipated returns, particularly if worldwide business activity continues to be impacted by COVID-19. The duration and extent of the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic depend on future developments that cannot be accurately predicted at this time, and if we are not able to respond to and manage the impact of such events effectively, our business may be harmed.

In 2020, our largest digital property, Microsoft and affiliates, accounted for approximately 20% of our gross revenues generated from advertisers on digital properties, and our top five digital properties accounted for approximately 30% of our gross revenues. We have long-term contracts with our large digital properties, which, in general, contain minimum guarantee requirements. The typical contract length with our large digital properties is over two years (without any right by these properties to terminate earlier than that absent cause).

The loss of all or a significant part of our business with our largest partners, particularly Microsoft and its affiliates, or unfavorable changes in the terms of our agreements with these partners could significantly harm our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations.

Most of our advertisers do business with us by placing insertion orders for particular advertising campaigns. If we perform well on a particular campaign, then the advertiser may place new insertion orders with us for additional advertising campaigns. We rarely have any commitment from an advertiser beyond the campaign governed by a particular insertion order and, even then, each particular insertion order may not be completed since advertisers can typically terminate a campaign at any time on twenty-four hours’ notice. As a result, our success is dependent upon our ability to outperform our competitors and win repeat business from existing advertisers, while continually expanding the number of advertisers for whom we provide services. In addition, it is relatively easy for advertisers to seek an alternative provider for their campaigns because there are no significant switching costs. In addition, advertising agencies, with whom we do business, often have relationships with many different providers, each of whom may be running portions of the same campaign. Because we generally do not have long-term contracts, it may be difficult for us to accurately predict future revenue streams. We cannot provide assurance that our current advertisers will continue to use our solutions, or that we will be able to replace departing advertisers with new advertisers that provide us with comparable revenue.

We do business with our partners by allowing them to share in the revenues we receive from advertisers from campaigns that are placed on their digital properties. If the content we place on the digital property is successful, and the partner is satisfied with our performance and ability to generate revenue, the digital property partner may continue to want us to place content on their website. Alternatively, if we cannot maintain the quality of the content, digital property satisfaction with our platform may decrease. As our advertiser content may appear on multiple digital properties, any decrease in quality may rapidly affect many digital properties in a short period of time. Our commitments from digital properties are for various periods of time, but our success is dependent upon our ability to successfully execute campaigns using available digital space and maintaining partner satisfaction, while continually expanding the number of digital properties from whom we purchase digital space as needed to meet content volume. In addition, after expiration of our agreements, it is easy for digital properties to seek an alternative supplier of content for their digital space because there are no switching costs. We also face a risk that digital property contract renewals decrease our margins as digital properties may seek to negotiate a higher revenue share. Thus, we cannot provide assurance that our current partners will continue to want us to place content on their digital properties, or that we will be able to replace departing digital properties with new digital properties that provide us with sufficient or comparable digital space. In addition, certain trends in the industry designed to achieve a different user experience may significantly impact our business. For example, a partner may redesign its digital property causing us to have less real estate for our content or placing us in less profitable locations of the website.

We must maintain a consistent supply of attractive content and quality digital properties on which we place content. If our access to attractive content diminishes, our ability to pay digital properties will diminish, and if access

to quality digital properties diminishes then advertisers may not want to work with us. Thus, our success depends both on our ability to secure quality content and digital real estate.

The amount, quality and cost of supply available to us can change over time. Our digital properties’ contracts are for various periods. As a result, we cannot provide any assurance that we will have ongoing access to a consistent supply of quality digital real estate. Moreover, the number of competitors in our industry is substantial and continues to increase, which could negatively affect the terms of doing business with our digital property partners and ultimately our gross margin. If we are unable to compete favorably for digital properties, we may not be able to place content at competitive rates or find alternative sources of supply with comparable traffic patterns and consumer demographics in a timely manner. Similarly, if we are unable to maintain a consistent supply of quality content from advertisers for any reason, our business, digital property partners retention and loyalty, financial condition and results of operations would be harmed.

Our business model depends on our ability to coordinate the supply of advertising inventory from our digital property partners with demand for that inventory from advertisers. Any material failure to effectively maintain a sufficient number of advertisers relative to the inventory we have available could cause digital properties not to utilize our platform or impair Taboola’s AI’s ability to accurately predict user engagement. As a result, our relationships with certain digital properties, our revenues and our business could be adversely impacted.

Advertiser and digital property satisfaction with our solution depends on our ability to place high quality advertiser content with content from digital properties that is well-suited to the advertiser’s product or service. If we are unable to keep our advertisers’ content from being placed with low quality, offensive or other non-compliant editorial content, or if we are unable to keep low quality, offensive or other non-compliant ads off of our network of digital properties, our reputation and business may suffer. As we grow our business to serve a larger number of advertisers and digital properties, it could become more challenging to prevent low quality, offensive or other non-compliant content from being shown. In addition, the categories of content that our digital properties accept may change over time and as these categories are removed from our inventory, we could suffer a decrease in cost-per-click and overall revenue. If we are unable to maintain the quality of our advertiser and digital properties, our reputation and business may suffer and we may not be able to retain or secure additional advertiser or digital property relationships.

Although the majority of our agreements with digital properties have historically required digital properties to provide us with exclusivity for the term of the agreement, there is no guarantee that we will be able to continue to obtain such exclusive arrangements or to renew existing arrangements on similar terms in the future. To the extent that such exclusivity is reduced or eliminated for any reason, including due to changes in market practice or changes in or in response to laws, rules or regulations, our partners could elect to implement other platforms or services on their digital properties or to seek out other third parties with which to do business, which could be detrimental to our performance, thereby reducing our revenues and having an adverse effect on our business.

Our business depends in part on providing our advertisers and digital properties with a service that they trust, and we have contractual commitments to take reasonable measures to prevent click fraud or distributing content on undesirable digital properties. We use proprietary technology to detect click fraud and block inventory that we know

or suspect to be fraudulent. Preventing and combating fraud requires constant vigilance, and we may not always be successful in our efforts to do so. In addition, as we continue to improve our click fraud detection mechanisms, we may find that a portion of our traffic is the result of click fraud, and eliminating this fraudulent traffic would reduce our revenues. We also use proprietary technology to prevent our advertisers’ content from appearing on undesirable digital properties, but we may not be successful in doing so, which would harm our relationship with advertisers. Any of these things would harm our brand and reputation and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our platform and business are subject to a wide variety of risks from individuals both inside and outside our company. We have established policies and procedures to manage our exposure to risk, including risks arising from the actions of our employees. These policies may not be adequate or effective in managing our future risk exposure or protecting us against unidentified or unanticipated risks. Although we regularly update our policies and procedures, including with respect sanctions, bribery, money laundering and insider trading, we may fail to predict future risks due to rapid changes in the market and regulatory conditions and in new markets we enter. Although we have established internal controls to ensure our risk management policies and procedures are adhered to by our employees as we conduct our business, our internal controls may not effectively prevent or detect any non-compliance of our policies and procedures. In particular, these measures may not adequately address or prevent all illegal, improper, or otherwise inappropriate activity from occurring and such conduct could expose us to liability, including through litigation, or adversely affect our brand or reputation. Further, any negative publicity related to the foregoing, whether such an incident occurred on our platform or on our competitors’ platforms, could adversely affect public perception of our industry as a whole, which could negatively affect demand for platforms like ours, and potentially lead to increased regulatory or litigation exposure. Any of the foregoing risks could negatively impact our business, results of operations and reputation.

Building and maintaining market awareness, brand recognition and goodwill in a cost-effective manner is important to our overall success in achieving widespread acceptance of our existing and future solutions. In particular, our business depends on access to strong brands and well-known digital properties, such as prominent media outlets, and failing to maintain and enhance our relationships with such brands and digital properties would hurt our ability to strengthen our own brand and to expand our current number of advertisers and digital properties. Our efforts in developing our brand may be hindered by the marketing efforts of our competitors, to the degree our competitors are able to decrease the number of high-profile digital properties we are able to work with. Alternatively, if a significant number of well-known digital properties ceased to do business with us due to changing market conditions or for other reasons, our own brand image and reputation could suffer and our business and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Technologies have been developed, and will likely continue to be developed, that can block the display of our ads or content or block our ad measurement tools, particularly for advertising displayed on personal computers. We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising, including revenue resulting from the display of ads via our platform on personal computers. Revenue generated from the display of ads on personal computers has been impacted by these technologies from time to time. As a result, these technologies may have an adverse effect on our financial results and, if such technologies continue to proliferate, in particular with respect to mobile platforms, our future financial results may be harmed.

Our products and services depend on the ability of consumers to access the Internet. Currently, this access is provided by companies that have significant market power in the broadband and internet access marketplace, including incumbent telephone companies, cable companies, mobile communications companies, and government-owned service providers. Some of these providers may take measures that could degrade, disrupt, or increase the cost of user access by restricting or prohibiting the use of their infrastructure to support our platform, by charging increased fees to us or our users, or by providing our competitors preferential access. Some jurisdictions have adopted regulations prohibiting certain forms of discrimination by internet access providers; however, substantial uncertainty exists in the United States and elsewhere regarding such protections. For example, in 2018 the United States Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules, which could permit internet access providers to restrict, block, degrade, or charge for access. In addition, our platform may be subject to government-initiated restrictions or blockages. COVID-19 has also resulted in quarantines, shelter in place orders, and work from home directives, all of which have increased demands for internet access and may create access challenges. These could result in a decrease of users interacting with our platform, and could impair our ability to attract new advertisers and digital properties.

In addition, we rely on data signals from user activity on websites that we do not control in order to deliver relevant and effective ads on behalf of our advertisers. Our advertising revenue is dependent on targeting and measurement tools that incorporate these signals, and any changes in our ability to use such signals will adversely affect our business. For example, legislative and regulatory changes, such as the GDPR and CCPA, may impact our ability to use such signals in our ad products. In addition, mobile operating system and browser providers, such as Apple and Google, have announced product changes as well as future plans to limit the ability of application developers to use these signals to target and measure advertising on their platforms. These developments may limit our ability to target and measure the effectiveness of ads on our platform, and any additional loss of such signals in the future will adversely affect our targeting and measurement capabilities and negatively impact our advertising revenue.

Large and established internet and technology companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google may have the power to significantly change the very nature of the internet display advertising marketplace, and these changes could materially disadvantage us. For example, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have substantial resources and have a significant share of widely adopted industry platforms such as web browsers, mobile operating systems and advertising exchanges and networks. In addition, these or other companies may bundle other services alongside the services that compete with our solutions, thus potentially creating a more competitive platform than ours. Therefore, these companies could leverage their position to make changes to their web browsers, mobile operating systems, platforms, exchanges, networks or other products or services that could be significantly harmful to our business and results of operations.

If a significant number of these digital properties violate their agreements, it could be impractical for us to pursue remedies against all of them and as a result we may lack sufficient or timely advertising inventory for our advertiser clients. As a result, advertisers may be less likely to contract with us in the future. The combined effect of this disruption to our anticipated advertising inventory, and related supply and demand dynamics, could have an adverse effect on our revenue, business operations and reputation.

As part of our business strategy, we have made and may make future investments in or acquisitions of complementary companies, products or technologies. These activities involve significant risks to our business. We may not be able to find suitable acquisition candidates, and we may not be able to complete such acquisitions on

favorable terms, if at all. If we do complete acquisitions, they may not ultimately strengthen our competitive position. Any acquisitions we complete could be viewed negatively by our partners and clients, which could have an adverse impact on our business. In addition, if we are unsuccessful at integrating employees or technologies acquired, our financial condition and results of operations, including revenue growth, could be adversely affected. Any acquisition and subsequent integration will require significant time and resources. We may not be able to successfully evaluate and use the acquired technology or employees, or otherwise manage the acquisition and integration processes successfully. We will be required to pay cash, incur debt and/or issue equity securities to pay for any such acquisition, each of which could adversely affect our financial condition. Our use of cash to pay for acquisitions would limit other potential uses of our cash, including investments in our sales and marketing and product development organizations, and in infrastructure to support scalability. The issuance or sale of equity or convertible debt securities to finance any such acquisitions would result in dilution to our stockholders. If we incur debt, it would result in increased fixed obligations and could also impose covenants or other restrictions that could impede our ability to manage our operations.

We continue to be substantially dependent on our sales team and account managers to obtain new digital properties and advertisers and to drive sales from our existing digital properties and advertisers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, integrating and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. New hires require significant training and it may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our recent hires and planned hires may not become productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. In addition, if we continue to grow rapidly, a large percentage of our sales team will be new to the company and our solutions. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, or the sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new digital properties and advertisers or increasing sales to our existing digital property and advertiser base, our business would be adversely affected. Finally, managing our sales team and account managers, particularly in light of our growth, and enforcing compliance with our sales policies is a challenge for us.

Our future success depends on our ability to continue to attract, retain and motivate highly skilled employees, software engineers and other employees with the technical skills in artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms that will enable us to deliver effective advertising and content solutions. Competition for highly skilled employees in our industry is intense, in particular in the fields of artificial intelligence and data science, and we expect certain of our key competitors, who generally are larger than us and have access to more substantial resources, to pursue top talent even more aggressively.

We may be unable to attract or retain such highly skilled personnel who are critical to our success, which could hinder our ability to keep pace with innovation and technological change in our industry or result in harm to our key advertiser and digital property relationships, loss of key information, expertise or proprietary knowledge and unanticipated recruitment and training costs. The loss of the services of such key employees could make it more difficult to successfully operate our business and pursue our business goals.

We anticipate that we will continue to depend on various third-party relationships in order to grow our business. We continue to pursue additional relationships with third parties, such as technology and content providers, content delivery networks, data partnerships, co-location facilities and other strategic partners. Identifying, negotiating and documenting relationships with third parties requires significant time and resources, as does integrating third-party data and services. Our agreements with providers of technology, computer hardware, co-location facilities, and

content are typically non-exclusive, do not prohibit them from working with our competitors or from offering competing services and do not typically have minimum purchase commitments. Our competitors may be effective in providing incentives to third parties to favor their products or services over ours or to otherwise prevent or reduce purchases of our solutions. In addition, these third parties may go out of business, no longer offer their services to us or not perform as expected under our agreements with them, and we may have disagreements or disputes with such third parties, which could negatively affect our brand and reputation.

In particular, our continued growth depends on our ability to source computer hardware, including servers built to our specifications, and the ability to locate those servers and related hardware in co-location facilities in the most desirable locations to facilitate the timely delivery of our services. Disruptions in the services provided at co-location facilities that we rely upon can degrade the level of services that we can provide, which could harm our business. We also rely on our integration with many third-party technology providers to execute our business on a daily basis. We rely on a third-party domain name service, or DNS, to direct traffic to our closest data center for efficient processing. If our DNS provider experiences disruptions or performance problems, this could result in inefficient balancing of traffic across our servers as well as impairing or preventing web browser connectivity to our site, which could harm our business.

Our future success depends heavily upon the continuing services of our key employees, including our founder and CEO, Adam Singolda, and on our ability to attract and retain members of our management team and other highly skilled employees, including software engineers, analytics and operations employees and sales professionals. The market for talent in our key areas of operations, including New York, Tel Aviv, California, Bangkok, Sao Paulo and London, is intensely competitive. Our competitors may provide more generous benefits, more diverse opportunities and better chances for career advancement than we do. Some of these advantages may be more appealing to high-quality candidates than those we have to offer. Any of our employees may terminate his or her employment with us at any time.

New employees often require significant training and, in many cases, take significant time before they achieve full productivity. As a result, we may incur significant costs to attract and retain employees, including significant expenditures related to salaries and benefits and compensation expenses related to equity awards, and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training them. Moreover, new employees may not be or become as productive as we expect, as we may face challenges in adequately or appropriately integrating them into our workforce and culture. In addition, as we move into new geographies, we will need to attract and recruit skilled employees in those areas.

Even if we are successful in hiring qualified new employees, we may be subject to allegations that we have improperly solicited such employees while they remained employed by our competitors, that such employees have improperly solicited other colleagues of theirs employed by the same competitors or that such employees have divulged proprietary or other confidential information to us in violation of their agreements with such competitors. If we are unable to attract, integrate and retain suitably qualified individuals, our business, financial position and results of operations would be harmed.

We are undergoing rapid growth and we intend to further expand our overall headcount and operations both domestically and internationally and through acquisitions, and we may not be able to do so while effectively maintaining our corporate culture. We believe our corporate culture has been a critical component of our success as we believe it fosters innovation, teamwork, passion for partners and clients and focus on execution, while facilitating knowledge sharing across our organization. As we grow and change, we may find it difficult to preserve our corporate culture, which could reduce our ability to innovate and operate effectively. In turn, the failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to attract, recruit, integrate and retain employees, continue to perform at current levels and effectively execute our business strategy.

Our revenue, cash flow and other key operating and performance metrics may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of our advertiser clients’ spending on advertising campaigns. For example, many advertisers tend to devote more of their advertising budgets to the fourth calendar quarter to coincide with consumer holiday spending and correspondingly to spend less in the first quarter. Moreover, advertising inventory in the fourth quarter may be more expensive due to increased demand for it. Our historical revenue growth has masked the impact of seasonality in the past, but if our growth rate declines or seasonal spending becomes more pronounced, seasonality could have a more significant impact on our revenue, cash flow and results of operations from period to period.

We usually incur the cost of an advertiser’s campaign before we bill for services. A portion of our advertiser-side business is sourced through advertising agencies, and we contract with these agencies as agent for a disclosed principal, which is the advertiser. Typically, the advertising agency pays for our services once it has received payment from the advertiser for our services. Our agreements with these agencies typically provide that if the advertiser does not pay the agency, the agency is not liable to us, and we must seek payment solely from the advertiser.

In addition, contracting with advertisers who have or develop high-risk credit profiles, subjects us to credit risk. This credit risk may vary depending on the nature of the advertiser’s business and the advertiser’s monetization of the traffic generated. Any inability to collect costs we have advanced or other amounts due to us, including write-offs of accounts receivable, could have a materially negative effect on our results of operations.

We often pay our digital properties their share of the revenue generated by an advertiser’s campaigns whether or not we have received payment from the advertisers and even if we never receive payment from such advertiser. In addition, we agree with digital properties on a fixed cost for the digital space but a large portion of our revenue from advertisers is tied to the performance of the campaign. As a result, our results of operations and financial condition could be adversely impacted if we do not receive timely payment from our advertisers or if our campaigns do not perform as expected.

Various foreign and domestic labor laws govern our relationship with our employees and affect our operating costs. These laws include overtime and sick pay, paid time off, work scheduling, healthcare reform, unemployment tax rates, workers’ compensation rates and applicable local labor or works council laws. A number of factors could adversely affect our operating results, including additional government-imposed increases in overtime and sick pay, paid leaves of absence, mandated health benefits, and changing regulations from the National Labor Relations Board in the United States or similar agencies in other jurisdictions. Complying with any new legislation or reversing changes implemented under existing law could be time-intensive and expensive and may adversely affect our business.

We are subject to a variety of laws and regulations in the United States and other countries that involve matters central to our business, including privacy, data protection, content, competition, consumer protection, and other matters. The expansion of our activities in certain jurisdictions, or other actions that we may take may subject us to additional laws, regulations, or other government scrutiny. In addition, foreign data protection, privacy, content, competition, and other laws and regulations can impose different obligations or be more restrictive than those in the United States. For additional discussion of data privacy and data protection laws applicable to our business, see “Risk

Factors—Risks Related to Laws and Regulations—Legislation and regulation of online businesses, including privacy and data protection regimes, could create unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our technology platform or business model, which could have a material adverse effect on our business.”

Laws and regulations of the countries and their legal subdivisions in which we operate or conduct business or in which our employees reside, which in some cases can be enforced by private parties in addition to government entities, are constantly evolving and can be subject to significant change. As a result, the application, interpretation, and enforcement of these laws and regulations are often uncertain, particularly in the new and rapidly evolving industry in which we operate, and may be interpreted and applied inconsistently from country to country and inconsistently with our current policies and practices. For example, regulatory or legislative actions affecting the manner in which we display content to our users could adversely affect user growth and engagement. Such actions could affect the manner in which we provide access to our platform or adversely affect our financial results.

These laws and regulations, as well as any associated claims, inquiries, or investigations or any other government actions, have in the past led to, and may in the future lead to, unfavorable outcomes including increased compliance costs, delays or impediments in the development of new products, negative publicity and reputational harm, increased operating costs, diversion of management time and attention, and remedies that harm our business, including fines or demands or orders that we modify or cease existing business practices.

Government regulation could increase the costs of doing business online. U.S. and many other governments have enacted or are considering legislation and regulation related to online advertising to which we are or may become subject, and we expect to see an increase in legislation and regulation related to digital advertising, the collection and use of Internet user data and unique device identifiers, such as IP address or unique mobile device identifiers, and other data protection and privacy regulation. The regulatory environment related to privacy and data protection is increasingly rigorous, with new and constantly changing requirements applicable to our business, and enforcement practices are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. Such legislation and regulation could affect the costs of doing business online, and could reduce the demand for our solutions or otherwise harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. These laws and regulations may be interpreted and applied differently over time and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it is possible that they will be interpreted and applied in ways that may have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flows. For example, a wide variety of provincial, state, national and international laws and regulations apply to the collection, use, retention, protection, disclosure, transfer and other processing of personal data. While we generally have not collected data from Internet users that is traditionally considered personally identifiable data, such as name, email address, address, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, financial or health data, we typically do collect and store IP addresses, other device identifiers that are or may be considered personal data in some jurisdictions or otherwise may be the subject of legislation or regulation.

For example, in the United States, various federal and state regulators, including governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, have adopted, or are considering adopting, laws and regulations concerning privacy and data protection. Certain state laws may be more stringent or broader in scope, or offer greater individual rights, with respect to personal information than federal, international or other state laws, and such laws may differ from each other, all of which may complicate compliance efforts. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, or the CCPA, which increases privacy rights for California residents and imposes obligations on companies that process their personal information (including device identifiers, IP addresses, cookies and geo-location), came into effect on January 1, 2020. Among other things, the CCPA requires covered companies to provide new disclosures to California consumers and provide such consumers new data protection and privacy rights, including the ability to opt-out of certain sales of personal information. The CCPA provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for certain data breaches that result in the loss of personal information. Additionally, voters approved a new privacy law, the California Privacy Rights Act, or the CPRA, in November 2020. Beginning on January 1, 2023, the CPRA will significantly modify the CCPA, including by expanding consumers’ rights with respect to certain sensitive personal information. State laws are changing rapidly and there is discussion in Congress of a new comprehensive federal data privacy law to which we would become subject if it is enacted.

Internationally, laws, regulations and standards in many jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, retention, security, disclosure, transfer and other processing of personal data. For example, the GDPR, which became effective in May 2018, greatly increased the European Commission’s jurisdictional reach of its laws and adds a broad array of requirements for handling personal data (including online identifiers and location data). EU member states are tasked under the GDPR to enact, and have enacted, certain implementing legislation that adds to and/or further interprets the GDPR requirements and potentially extends our obligations and potential liability for failing to meet such obligations. The GDPR, together with national legislation, regulations and guidelines of the EU member states and the United Kingdom governing the processing of personal data, impose strict obligations and restrictions on the ability to collect, use, retain, protect, disclose, transfer and otherwise process personal data. In particular, the GDPR includes obligations and restrictions concerning the consent and rights of individuals to whom the personal data relates, the transfer of personal data out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, security breach notifications and the security and confidentiality of personal data. The GDPR authorizes fines for certain violations of up to 4% of global annual revenue or €20 million, whichever is greater. In addition, some countries are considering or have passed legislation implementing data protection requirements or requiring local storage and processing of data or similar requirements that could increase the cost and complexity of delivering our services.

Evolving and changing definitions of personal data, within the EU, the United States and elsewhere, especially relating to classification of IP addresses, machine or device identifiers and other information, have in the past and could cause us in the future, to change our business practices, expend significant costs to modify our data processing practices or policies, distract management or divert resources from other initiatives and project, or limit or inhibit our ability to operate or expand our business. Data protection and privacy-related laws and regulations are evolving and could result in ever-increasing regulatory and public scrutiny and escalating levels of enforcement and sanctions. While we currently take steps to avoid collecting personal data that would enable the direct identification of Internet users, we may inadvertently receive this information from advertisers or advertising agencies or through the process of delivering our service. Additionally, while we take measures to protect the security of information that we collect, use and disclose in the operation of our business, and to offer certain privacy protections with respect to such information, such measures may not always be effective. Our advertising clients or digital property partners have or may in the future impose new restrictions relating to the GDPR, the CCPA and other privacy and data protection laws and regulations with which we must adapt and comply. Our failure to comply with applicable laws and regulations, or to protect personal data, could result in enforcement or litigation action against us, including fines, sanctions, penalties, judgments, imprisonment of our officers and public censure, claims for damages by consumers and other affected individuals, damage to our reputation and loss of goodwill, any of which could have a material adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, could harm our reputation and inhibit adoption of our solutions by current and future clients and partners.

As the use of cookies has received ongoing media attention in recent years, some government regulators and privacy advocates have suggested creating a “Do Not Track” standard that would allow Internet users to express a preference, independent of cookie settings in their web browser, not to have their website browsing recorded. All the major Internet browsers have implemented some version of a “Do Not Track” setting. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer includes a “Do Not Track” setting that is selected “on” by default. However, there is limited guidance, consensus and industry standards regarding the definition of “tracking,” what message is conveyed by a “Do Not Track” setting and how to respond to a “Do Not Track” preference. We could face competing policy standards, or standards that put our business model at a competitive disadvantage to other companies that collect data from Internet users, standards that reduce the effectiveness of our solutions, or standards that require us to make costly changes to our solutions. The FTC has stated that it will pursue a legislative solution if the industry cannot agree upon a standard. “Do Not Track” has seen renewed emphasis from proponents of the CCPA, and the CCPA, in certain circumstances, requires browser-based or similar “do not sell” signals. If a standard is imposed by state or federal legislation, or agreed upon by standard setting groups, that requires us to recognize a “Do Not Track” signal and prohibits us from using data as we currently do, then that could hinder growth of advertising and content production on the web generally, and limit the quality and amount of data we are able to store and use, which would cause us to change our business practices and adversely affect our business.

As “native” advertising, or advertising content designed to blend in with editorial content, increases in popularity among advertisers, digital properties, marketers and regulators are still considering varying approaches and guidelines relating to the labelling of such content. In the United States, the FTC requires that all online advertising must meet a few basic principles: it must be truthful and not misleading, it must substantiate any express or implied claims, it cannot be unfair or deceptive, and any disclosures necessary to make an ad accurate must be clear and conspicuous. The FTC clarified those requirements in March 2013 with a document titled “Dot Com Disclosures: Information about Online Advertising.” Although open to interpretation, those guidelines suggested paid online ads must be disclosed and adequately labeled to users. In December 2013, the FTC held a workshop to discuss whether media outlets are adequately identifying sponsored stories. No clear answers were derived from the workshop, as the FTC did not offer specific guidance on exactly how that content should be labeled. However, failing to clearly disclose something material in an advertisement would, in the views of some participants, be a violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. Also, in May 2019, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a self-regulatory agency, released its “Native Advertising Playbook 2.0” with the aim of providing a framework for native advertising, including how to clearly and prominently disclose the material as an advertisement. The playbook explains that native advertising must plainly disclose that the ad has been paid for in a conspicuous manner, but does not provide much in the way of additional disclosure guidance. Similarly, self-regulatory bodies such as the National Advertising Division (“NAD”), the investigative unit of the advertising industry’s system of self-regulation administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which has in the past year investigated several advertisers for their native advertising practices in the print and digital space as part of its routine monitoring program, has not provided specific guidance to digital properties and marketers. The NAD’s guidance has relied on the FTC’s advice to search engine companies, which emphasizes the need for visual cues, labels or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements in order to avoid misleading consumers, but does not specify what cues, labels or techniques should be used. In the past, both NAD and Advertising Standards Authority, the UK’s independent regulator of advertising, have handled complaints filed against us with respect to our labeling. While those complaints have since been resolved and we seek to comply with respect to the clear labeling rules and guidance issued by NAD and ASA, it is possible that the FTC or one of these self-regulatory bodies could disagree and find that our disclosures are not sufficiently clear or conspicuous to avoid misleading consumers and should be modified. Similar or more stringent standards and self-regulatory principals have been or could be implemented in other countries as well.

If we make mistakes in the implementation of such guidance, or our commitments with respect to these principles, we could be subject to negative publicity, government investigation, government or private litigation, or investigation by self-regulatory bodies or other accountability groups. Any such action against us could be costly and time consuming, require us to change our business practices, cause us to divert management’s attention and our resources and be damaging to our reputation and our business. Moreover, additional or different disclosures may lead to a reduction in end-user’s interaction with sponsored content we distribute resulting in reduced profitability to our digital properties and ourselves.

We are subject to complex and changing advertising regulations in many jurisdictions in which we operate, and we are obligated to comply with such advertising regulations in connection with the advertising we distribute on behalf of our advertiser clients. For example, much of the federal oversight on digital advertising in the U.S. currently comes from the FTC, which has primarily relied upon Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits companies from engaging in “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices, including alleged violations of representations concerning privacy protections and acts that allegedly violate individuals’ privacy interests. If we or our advertiser clients are not able to comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations, we could be directly harmed, and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability. This may require us to expend substantial resources or to alter our business strategy, which would negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our platform allows our advertisers’ advertisements to be displayed on the digital properties of our partners. Although Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity, subject to certain conditions, to certain online platforms from claims related to third-party content, the law relating to the liability of online service providers for others’ activities on their services may change. Congressional efforts to restrict the scope of the protections available to online platforms under Section 230, and our current protections from liability for third-party content in the United States, could decrease or change as a result. Claims may be brought against us for defamation, negligence, breach of contract, copyright and trademark infringement, unfair competition, unlawful activity, torts, fraud, or other legal theories based on the nature and content of information available on or via our platform.

We may be subject to claims by virtue of our involvement in hosting, transmitting or providing access to content created by third parties. Defense of any such actions could be costly and involve significant time and attention of our management and other resources, may result in monetary liabilities or penalties, or may require us to change our business in an adverse manner. If the content or ads displayed on our platform are found to be illegal under applicable local law, we may be exposed to fines, civil penalties or consent decrees for such violations of law, which could adversely affect our revenue, reputation and results of operations. In extreme cases, false advertising could lead not only to civil penalties and fines, but also allegations of criminal wrongdoing.

From time to time we are involved in various legal proceedings or government investigations, including, but not limited to, actions relating to breach of contract, intellectual property infringement, competition law or other issues. For example, in April 2021, we became aware that the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation of hiring activities in our industry, including us. We are cooperating with the Antitrust Division. While there can be no assurances as to the ultimate outcome, we do not believe that our conduct violated applicable law. Claims may be expensive to defend, may divert management’s time away from our operations, and may affect the availability and premiums of our liability insurance coverage, regardless of whether they are meritorious or ultimately lead to a judgment against us. We cannot assure you we will be able to successfully defend or resolve any current or future litigation matters, in which case those litigation matters could have a material and adverse effect on our business, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, reputation and prospects.

As a multinational organization, operating in multiple jurisdictions such as Israel, the United States, the European Union, United Kingdom, Turkey, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, India and Thailand, among others, we may be subject to taxation in several jurisdictions around the world with increasingly complex tax laws, the application of which may be uncertain. The amount of taxes we pay in these jurisdictions could increase substantially as a result of changes in the applicable tax principles, including increased tax rates, new tax laws or revised interpretations of existing tax laws and precedents, which could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and results of operations. In addition, as internet commerce and globalization continue to evolve, increasing regulation by government authorities becomes more likely. Our business could be negatively impacted by the application of existing laws and regulations or the enactment of new laws applicable to digital advertising. The cost to comply with such laws or regulations could be significant, and we may be unable to pass along those costs to our clients in the form of increased fees, which may negatively affect our business and results of operation. We are subject to regular review and audit by Israeli, US and other foreign tax authorities. Although we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional taxes, interest and penalties, and the authorities could claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries, any of which could materially affect our income tax provision, net income, or cash flows in the period or periods for which such determination and settlement is made.

The tax effects of the accounting for stock-based compensation may significantly impact our effective tax rate from period to period. In periods in which our stock price is higher than the grant price of the stock-based compensation vesting in that period, we will recognize excess tax benefits that will decrease our effective tax rate, while in periods in which our stock price is lower than the grant price of the stock-based compensation vesting in that period, our effective tax rate may increase. The amount and value of stock-based compensation issued relative to our earnings in a particular period will also affect the magnitude of the impact of stock-based compensation on our effective tax rate. These tax effects are dependent on our stock price, which we do not control, and a decline in our stock price could significantly increase our effective tax rate and adversely affect our financial results.

We collect value added and other similar taxes in a number of jurisdictions. One or more countries or U.S. states may seek to impose incremental or new sales, use, value added, digital services, or other tax collection obligations on us. A successful assertion by one or more U.S. states or foreign countries or change of law requiring us to collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do collect some taxes, could result in substantial liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as interest and penalties. Furthermore, certain jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, France, India and Italy have recently introduced a digital services tax, which is generally a tax on gross revenue generated from users or customers located in those jurisdictions, and other jurisdictions have enacted or are considering enacting similar laws. A successful assertion by a U.S. state or local government, or other country or jurisdiction that we should have been or should be collecting additional sales, use, value added, digital services or other similar taxes could, among other things, result in substantial tax payments, create significant administrative burdens for us, discourage potential customers from subscribing to our platform due to the incremental cost of any such sales or other related taxes, or otherwise harm our business.

Some of our operations in Israel, referred to as “Privileged Enterprise” for FY 2018-2019 and “Preferred Technological Enterprise” commencing FY 2020 carry certain tax benefits under the Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investments, 5719-1959 (the “Investment Law”). In order to be eligible for tax benefits under the Investment Law, our Privileged/Preferred Technological Enterprises must comply with various conditions set forth in the Investment Law, as well as periodic reporting obligations. If we do not meet the requirements for maintaining these benefits or if our assumptions regarding the key elements affecting our tax rates are rejected by the Israeli tax authorities, they may be reduced or cancelled and the relevant operations would be subject to Israeli corporate tax at the standard rate, which is 23% in 2018 and thereafter.

In addition to being subject to the standard corporate tax rate, we could be required to refund any tax benefits we have already received, plus interest and penalties thereon under this program or similar programs we have utilized in the past. Even if we continue to meet the relevant requirements, the tax benefits our current “Privileged/Preferred Technological Enterprise” receive may not be continued in the future at their current levels or at all. If these tax benefits were reduced or eliminated, the amount of taxes we pay would likely increase, as all of our Israeli operations would consequently be subject to corporate tax at the standard rate, which could adversely affect our results of operations. Additionally, if we increase our activities outside of Israel, for example, by way of acquisitions, our increased activities may not be eligible for inclusion in Israeli tax benefit programs. If Israel discontinues or modifies these programs and potential tax benefits, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Many of the jurisdictions in which we conduct business have detailed transfer pricing rules, which require contemporaneous documentation establishing that all transactions with non-resident related parties be priced using arm’s length pricing principles. The tax authorities in these jurisdictions could challenge our related party transfer pricing policies and as a consequence the tax treatment of corresponding expenses and income. International transfer pricing is an area of taxation that depends heavily on the underlying facts and circumstances and generally involves

a significant degree of judgment. If any of these tax authorities were to be successful in challenging our transfer pricing policies, we may be liable for additional corporate income tax, and penalties and interest related thereto, which may have a significant impact on our results of operations and financial condition.

We are subject to export control and import laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. We are also subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the United Kingdom Bribery Act 2010, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, Chapter 9 (sub-chapter 5) of the Israeli Penal Law, 1977, the Israeli Prohibition on Money Laundering Law—2000 and possibly other anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in countries outside of the United States in which we conduct our activities. Compliance with these laws has been the subject of increasing focus and activity by regulatory authorities, both in the United States and elsewhere, in recent years. Anti-corruption laws are interpreted broadly and prohibit companies and their employees and third-party intermediaries from authorizing, promising, offering, providing, soliciting or accepting, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits to or from any person whether in the public or private sector. Although we endeavor to conduct our business in accordance with applicable laws and regulations, we cannot guarantee compliance.

Noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, export control, sanctions and other trade laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, other enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, significant fines, damages, other civil and criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension and/or debarment from contracting with certain persons, the loss of export privileges, reputational harm, adverse media coverage and other collateral consequences. If subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be materially harmed. Responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense and compliance costs and other professional fees. In addition, regulatory authorities may seek to hold us liable for successor liability for violations committed by companies in which we invest or that we acquire. As a general matter, enforcement actions and sanctions could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.

Under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Code”), we will be classified as a PFIC for any taxable year in which, either (i) at least 75% of our gross income in a taxable year, including our pro rata share of the gross income of any corporation in which we are considered to own at least 25% of the shares by value, is passive income or (ii) at least 50% of our assets in a taxable year (ordinarily determined based on fair market value and averaged quarterly over the year), including our pro rata share of the assets of any corporation in which we are considered to own at least 25% of the shares by value, are held for the production of, or produce, passive income. Passive income generally includes, among other things, dividends, interest, rents and royalties (other than rents or royalties derived from the active conduct of a trade or business) and gains from the disposition of passive assets. PFIC status is determined annually and depends on the composition of a company’s income and assets and the fair market value of its assets and no assurance can be given as to whether we will be a PFIC in 2021 or for any future taxable years. In addition, our U.S. counsel expresses no opinion with respect to our PFIC status for 2021 or future taxable year, in particular because our PFIC status for any taxable year will generally be determined in part by reference to the value of our assets and our revenues. In addition, our U.S. counsel expresses no opinion with respect to our PFIC status for 2021 or future taxable years.

If we are a PFIC for any taxable year during which a U.S. investor holds our ordinary shares or warrants, we would continue to be treated as a PFIC with respect to that U.S. investor for all succeeding years during which the U.S. investor holds our ordinary shares or warrants, even if we ceased to meet the threshold requirements for PFIC status, unless certain exceptions apply. Such a U.S. investor may be subject to adverse U.S. federal income tax consequences, including (i) the treatment of all or a portion of any gain on the disposition of our ordinary shares or warrants as ordinary income (and therefore ineligible for the preferential rates that apply to capital gains with

reUspect to some U.S. investors), (ii) the application of a deferred interest charge on such gain and the receipt of certain dividends on our ordinary shares, (iii) the ineligibility to claim the preferential tax rate afforded to certain non-corporate U.S. investors on “qualified dividend income” with respect to dividends on our ordinary shares and (iv) compliance with certain reporting requirements.

For further discussion, see “U.S. Federal Income Tax Considerations — Tax Consequences to U.S. Holders of Ownership and Disposition of Our Ordinary Shares and Warrants.”

A number of Taboola directors and executive officers are not residents of the United States, and the majority of Taboola’s assets and the assets of these persons are located outside the United States. As a result, it may be difficult or impossible for investors to effect service of process upon Taboola within the United States or other jurisdictions, including judgments predicated upon the civil liability provisions of the federal securities laws of the United States. Additionally, it may be difficult to assert U.S. securities law claims in actions originally instituted outside of the United States. Foreign courts may refuse to hear a U.S. securities law claim because foreign courts may not be the most appropriate forum in which to bring such a claim. Even if a foreign court agrees to hear a claim, it may determine that the law of the jurisdiction in which the foreign court resides, and not U.S. law, is applicable to the claim. Further, if U.S. law is found to be applicable, the content of applicable U.S. law must be proved as a fact, which can be a time-consuming and costly process, and certain matters of procedure would still be governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which the foreign court resides.

Our success depends, in part, on our ability to protect proprietary methods and technologies that we develop under the intellectual property laws of Israel, the United States and other countries, so that we can prevent others from using our inventions and proprietary information. If we fail to protect our intellectual property rights adequately, our competitors might gain access to our technology, and our business could be adversely affected. We rely on trademark, copyright, trade secret and confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary methods and technologies. We have not received any patents covering our proprietary methods or technologies.

Unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our technology or obtain and use information we regard as proprietary. We generally enter into confidentiality and/or license agreements with our employees, consultants, vendors and advertisers, and generally limit access to and distribution of our proprietary information. However, any steps taken by us may not prevent misappropriation of our technology and proprietary information. Policing unauthorized use of our technology is difficult. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those of the United States, and mechanisms for enforcement of our proprietary rights in such countries may be inadequate. From time to time, legal action by us may be necessary to enforce our intellectual property rights, to protect our trade secrets, to determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others, or to defend against claims of infringement. Although we rely on trade secret laws to protect our intellectual property, we may encounter difficulties enforcing our rights given the lack of patent protection. Such litigation could result in substantial costs and the diversion of limited resources and could negatively affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. If we are unable to protect our proprietary rights, including aspects of our technology platform, we may find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to others who have not incurred the same level of expense, time and effort to create and protect their intellectual property.

Third parties may assert claims of infringement of intellectual property rights in proprietary technology against us or against our digital properties or advertisers for which we may be held liable or have an indemnification obligation. Our risk of third-party claims may be increased to the extent we rely on unaffiliated persons or firms, over whom we have less control than we would have over our own employees, to develop code. Any claim of infringement by a third party, even those without merit, could cause us to incur substantial costs defending against the claim and could distract our management from operating our business.

Although third parties may offer a license to their technology, the terms of any offered license may not be acceptable and the failure to obtain a license or the costs associated with any license could cause our business, financial condition and results of operations to be materially and adversely affected. In addition, some licenses may be non-exclusive, and therefore our competitors may have access to the same technology licensed to us. Alternatively, we may be required to develop non-infringing technology, which could require significant effort and expense and ultimately may not be successful. Furthermore, a successful claimant could secure a judgment or we may agree to a settlement that prevents us from distributing certain products or performing certain services or that requires us to pay substantial damages, including treble damages if we are found to have willfully infringed such claimant’s patents or copyrights, royalties or other fees. Any of these events could seriously harm our business financial condition and results of operations.

We receive representations from advertisers that the content we place on their behalf does not infringe on any third-party rights. We also rely on representations from our digital properties that they maintain adequate privacy policies that allow us to place pixels on their properties and collect data from users that visit those websites to aid in delivering our solutions. However, we do not independently verify whether we are permitted to deliver advertising to our digital properties’ Internet users or that the content we deliver is legally permitted. If any of our advertisers’ or digital properties’ representations are untrue and our advertisers or digital properties do not abide by foreign, federal, state or local laws or regulations governing their content or privacy practices, we could become subject to legal claims against us, we could be exposed to potential liability (for which we may or may not be indemnified by our advertisers or digital properties), and our reputation could be damaged. Even in those instances where our advertisers and digital properties do indemnify us, it is possible these entities may not be willing or able to cover the claims and we will be responsible for the cost of litigation or required to pay substantial damages.

Our agreements with digital properties, advertiser and other third parties may include indemnification provisions under which we agree to indemnify them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of intellectual property infringement, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from our products, services, or other contractual obligations. The term of these indemnity provisions generally survives termination or expiration of the applicable agreement. Large indemnity payments would harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our platform, including our computational infrastructure, relies on software licensed to us by third-party authors under “open-source” licenses. The use of open-source software may entail greater risks than the use of third-party commercial software, as open-source licensors generally do not provide warranties or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. Some open-source licenses contain requirements that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon the type of open-source software we use. If we combine our proprietary software with open-source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain open-source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. This would allow our competitors to create similar solutions with less development effort and time and ultimately put us at a competitive disadvantage.

Although we monitor our use of open-source software to avoid subjecting our products to conditions we do not intend, the terms of many open-source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our services. Moreover, we cannot guarantee our processes for controlling our use of open-source software will be effective. If we are held to have breached the terms of an open-source software license, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue operating our platform on terms that are not economically feasible, to re-engineer our platform or the supporting computational infrastructure to discontinue use of certain code, or to make generally available, in source code form, portions of our proprietary code, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

As we grow our business, we expect to continue to invest in technology services, hardware and software, including data centers, network services, storage and database technologies. Creating the appropriate support for our technology platform, including large-scale serving infrastructure and big data transmission, storage and computation infrastructure, is expensive and complex, and our execution could result in inefficiencies or operational failures and increased vulnerability to cyber-attacks or breaches, which, in turn, could diminish the quality of our services and our performance for our digital properties and our advertisers. Cyber-attacks could include denial-of-service attacks impacting service availability (including the ability to deliver ads) and reliability; the exploitation of software vulnerabilities in Internet facing applications; phishing attacks or social engineering of system administrators (tricking company employees into releasing control of their systems to a hacker); or the introduction of computer viruses, ransomware or malware into our systems with a view to steal confidential or proprietary data. Cyber-attacks of increasing sophistication may be difficult to detect and could result in the theft of our intellectual property and our data or our digital properties’ or advertisers’ data. In addition, we are vulnerable to unintentional errors as well as malicious actions by persons with authorized access to our systems that exceed the scope of their access rights, or unintentionally or intentionally alter parameters or otherwise interfere with the intended operations of our platform.

A hack into our system or a technology glitch may cause a catastrophic effect where a large number of digital properties will stop using our service in a short period of time. While we take measures to protect the security of the systems and information used in the operation of our business, and to implement certain privacy protections with respect to such information, such measures may not always be effective. The steps we take to increase the reliability, integrity and security of our systems as they scale may be expensive and may not prevent system failures, unintended vulnerabilities or other cybersecurity incidents, including those resulting from the increasing number of persons with access to our systems, complex interactions within our technology platform and the increasing number of connections with third party partners and vendors’ technology. Furthermore, because the methods of cyber-attack and deception change frequently, are increasingly complex and sophisticated, and can originate from a wide variety of sources, including nation-state actors, despite our reasonable efforts to ensure the integrity of our systems, we may not be able to anticipate, detect, appropriately react and respond to, or implement effective preventative measures against, all cybersecurity incidents. In addition to our own systems, we use third-party vendors to store, transmit and otherwise process certain of our confidential or proprietary data on our behalf. Due to applicable laws and regulations or contractual obligations, we may be held responsible for any cybersecurity incident attributed to our service providers as they relate to the information we share with them. Although we contractually require these service providers to implement and use reasonable security measures, we cannot control third parties and cannot guarantee a security breach will not occur in their systems.

We may be required to expend significant capital and other resources to protect against, respond to, and recover from any potential, attempted, or existing cybersecurity incidents. As cybersecurity incidents continue to evolve, we may be required to expend significant additional resources to continue to modify or enhance our protective measures or to investigate and remediate any information security vulnerabilities. In addition, our remediation efforts may not be successful. The inability to implement, maintain and upgrade adequate safeguards could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flow. Operational errors or failures or successful cyber-attacks, media reports about such an incident, whether accurate or not, or our failure to make adequate or timely disclosures to the public or law enforcement agencies following any such event, whether due to delayed discovery or a failure to follow existing protocols, could result in damage to our reputation, loss of current and new digital properties or advertisers and other partners and clients, the disclosure of personal, confidential, sensitive or proprietary data, interruptions to our operations and distraction to our management, and significant legal, regulatory and financial liabilities and lost revenues, which could harm our business.

While we currently maintain cybersecurity insurance, such insurance may not be sufficient in type or amount to cover us against claims related to breaches, failures or other cybersecurity-related incidents, and we cannot be certain that cyber insurance will continue to be available to us on economically reasonable terms, or at all, or that any insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.

We depend upon the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our technology platform to operate fundamental aspects of our business. If our technology platform cannot scale to meet demand, or if there are defects or errors in our execution of any of these functions on our platform, then our business could be harmed. Our software and systems are complex and may contain defects or errors, or may experience failures when implemented or when new functionality is released, as we may modify, enhance, upgrade and implement new software, systems, procedures and controls to reflect changes in our business, technological advancements and changing industry trends. Undetected errors and failures may occur, especially when new versions or updates are made. Despite testing by us, errors or bugs in our software have in the past, and may in the future, not be found until the software is in our live operating environment. Any defects, errors, failures or other similar performance problems or disruptions in our software or systems could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Defects, errors, failures or other similar performance problems or disruptions, whether in connection with day-to-day operations or otherwise, could damage our clients’ businesses and result in negative publicity, damage to our brand and reputation, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our solutions, increased costs or loss of revenue, loss of competitive position or claims by advertisers for losses sustained by them. In such an event, we may be required or choose to expend additional resources to help mitigate any problems resulting from defects, errors or failures in our software or systems. Alleviating problems resulting from defects, errors or failures in our software or systems could require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays or the cessation of our business, any of which would adversely impact our financial position, results of operations and growth prospects. In addition, if we experience any defects, errors, failures or other performance problems, our partners could seek to terminate or elect not to renew their contracts, delay or withhold payment or make claims against us. Any of these actions could result in liability, lost business, increased insurance costs, difficulty in collecting accounts receivable, costly litigation or adverse publicity, which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Additionally, our software utilizes open-source software and any defects or errors in such open-source software could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We rely on a variety of third-party service providers in connection with the operation of our solutions. Any performance issues, errors, bugs or defects in third-party software or services could result in errors, defects or a failure of our solutions, which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Many of our third-party service providers attempt to impose limitations on their liability for such performance issues, errors, bugs or defects, and if enforceable, we may have additional liability to our clients or to other third parties that could harm our reputation and increase our operating costs. Additionally, in the future, we might need to license other software or services to enhance our solutions and meet evolving client demands and requirements, which may not be available to us on commercially reasonable terms or at all. Any limitations in our ability to use or obtain third-party software or services could significantly increase our expenses and otherwise result in delays, a reduction in functionality or errors or failures of our solutions until equivalent technology or content is either developed by us or, if available, identified, obtained through purchase or licensed and integrated into our solutions, which could adversely affect our business. In addition, third-party software and services may expose us to increased risks, including risks associated with the integration of new technology, the diversion of resources from the development of our own proprietary technology and our inability to generate revenue from new technology sufficient to offset associated acquisition and maintenance costs, all of which may increase our expenses and materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. We will need to maintain our relationships with third-party service providers and obtain software and services from such providers that do not contain any errors or defects. Any failure to do so could adversely affect our ability to deliver effective solutions to our clients and adversely affect our business.

Most members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, interacting with public company investors, and complying with the increasingly complex laws, rules and regulations that govern public companies. As a public company, we are subject to significant obligations relating to reporting, procedures and internal controls, and our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage such obligations. These obligations and scrutiny will require significant attention from our management and could divert their attention away from the day-to-day management of our business, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

As a private company, we had not been required to evaluate our internal control over financial reporting in a manner that meets the standards of publicly traded companies required by Section 404(a) of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, or Section 404. As a public company, we have significant requirements for enhanced financial reporting and internal controls. The process of designing, implementing, testing and maintaining effective internal controls is a continuous effort that requires us to anticipate and react to changes in our business and the economic and regulatory environments. In this regard, we will need to continue to dedicate internal resources, potentially engage outside consultants, adopt a detailed work plan to assess and document the adequacy of internal control over financial reporting, continue steps to improve control processes as appropriate, validate through testing whether such controls are functioning as documented, and implement a continuous reporting and improvement process for internal control over financial reporting.

It is possible that our internal control over financial reporting is not effective because it cannot detect or prevent material errors at a reasonable level of assurance. If we are unable to establish or maintain appropriate internal financial reporting controls and procedures, it could cause us to fail to meet our reporting obligations on a timely basis, result in material misstatements in our consolidated financial statements and adversely affect our operating results. In addition, we will be required, pursuant to Section 404, to furnish a report by our management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting in the second annual report filed with the SEC. This assessment will need to include disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. The rules governing the standards that must be met for our management to assess our internal control over financial reporting are complex and require significant documentation and testing. Testing and maintaining internal controls may divert our management’s attention from other matters that are important to our business. In addition, pursuant to Section 404, we will be required to include in the annual reports that we file with the SEC an attestation report on our internal control over financial reporting issued by our independent registered public accounting firm.

Furthermore, as a public company, we may, during the course of our testing of our internal controls over financial reporting, or during the subsequent testing by our independent registered public accounting firm, identify deficiencies which would have to be remediated to satisfy the SEC rules for certification of our internal controls over financial reporting. As a consequence, we may have to disclose in periodic reports we file with the SEC significant deficiencies or material weaknesses in our system of internal controls. The existence of a material weakness would preclude management from concluding that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective, and would preclude our independent auditors from issuing an unqualified opinion that our internal controls over financial reporting are effective. In addition, disclosures of this type in our SEC reports could cause investors to lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reporting and may negatively affect the trading price of our ordinary shares, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by regulatory authorities. Moreover, effective internal controls are necessary to produce reliable financial reports and to prevent fraud. If we have deficiencies in our disclosure controls and procedures or internal controls over financial reporting, it could negatively impact our business, results of operations and reputation.

Because we qualify as a foreign private issuer under the Exchange Act, we are exempt from certain provisions of the Exchange Act that are applicable to U.S. domestic public companies, including (1) the sections of the Exchange Act regulating the solicitation of proxies, consents or authorizations in respect of a security registered under the Exchange Act, (2) the sections of the Exchange Act requiring insiders to file public reports of their share ownership and trading activities and liability for insiders who profit from trades made in a short period of time and (3) the rules under the Exchange Act requiring the filing with the SEC of quarterly reports on Form 10-Q containing unaudited financial and other specified information, although we are subject to Israeli laws and regulations with regard to certain of these matters and intend to furnish comparable quarterly information on Form 6-K. In addition, foreign private issuers are not required to file their annual report on Form 20-F until 120 days after the end of each fiscal year, while U.S. domestic issuers that are accelerated filers are required to file their annual report on Form 10-K within 75 days after the end of each fiscal year and U.S. domestic issuers that are large accelerated filers are required to file their annual report on Form 10-K within 60 days after the end of each fiscal year. Foreign private issuers are also exempt from Regulation FD, which is intended to prevent issuers from making selective disclosures of material information. As a result of all of the above, you may not have the same protections afforded to shareholders of a company that is not a foreign private issuer.

As discussed above, we are a foreign private issuer, and therefore, we are not required to comply with all of the periodic disclosure and current reporting requirements of the Exchange Act. The determination of foreign private issuer status is made annually on the last business day of an issuer’s most recently completed second fiscal quarter, and, accordingly, the next determination will be made with respect to us on June 30, 2022. In the future, we would lose our foreign private issuer status if (1) more than 50% of our outstanding voting securities are owned by U.S. residents and (2) a majority of our directors or executive officers are U.S. citizens or residents, or we fail to meet additional requirements necessary to avoid loss of foreign private issuer status. If we lose our foreign private issuer status, we will be required to file with the SEC periodic reports and registration statements on U.S. domestic issuer forms, which are more detailed and extensive than the forms available to a foreign private issuer. We will also have to mandatorily comply with U.S. federal proxy requirements, and our officers, directors and principal shareholders will become subject to the short-swing profit disclosure and recovery provisions of Section 16 of the Exchange Act. In addition, we will lose our ability to rely upon exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements under the listing rules of Nasdaq. As a U.S. listed public company that is not a foreign private issuer, we will incur significant additional legal, accounting and other expenses that we will not incur as a foreign private issuer.

As a foreign private issuer, we have the option to follow certain home country corporate governance practices rather than those of Nasdaq, provided that we disclose the requirements we are not following and describe the home country practices we are following. We rely on this “foreign private issuer exemption” with respect to Nasdaq rules for shareholder meetings quorums and rules requiring shareholder approval. We may in the future elect to follow home country practices with regard to other matters. As a result, our shareholders may not have the same protections afforded to shareholders of companies that are subject to all Nasdaq corporate governance requirements.

As a public company, we will incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the listing requirements of Nasdaq and other applicable securities rules and regulations impose various requirements on public companies, including establishment and maintenance of effective disclosure and financial controls and corporate governance practices. Our management and other personnel continue to devote a substantial amount of time to these compliance initiatives. Moreover, these rules and regulations will continue to increase our legal and financial

compliance costs and will make some activities more time-consuming and costly. For example, we expect that these rules and regulations may make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance, and could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified members of our board.

We continue to evaluate these rules and regulations and cannot predict or estimate the amount of additional costs we may incur or the timing of such costs. These rules and regulations are often subject to varying interpretations, in many cases due to their lack of specificity, and, as a result, their application in practice may evolve over time as new guidance is provided by regulatory and governing bodies. This could result in continuing uncertainty regarding compliance matters and higher costs necessitated by ongoing revisions to disclosure and governance practices.

We are required to comply with the SEC’s rules implementing Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires management to certify financial and other information in our annual reports and provide an annual management report on the effectiveness of control over financial reporting. Though we are required to disclose material changes in internal control over financial reporting on an annual basis, we will not be required to make our first annual assessment of our internal control over financial reporting pursuant to Section 404 until the year following our first annual report required to be filed with the SEC. To achieve compliance with Section 404 within the prescribed period, we are engaged in a process to document and evaluate our internal control over financial reporting, which is both costly and challenging. In this regard, we will need to continue to dedicate internal resources, potentially engage outside consultants and adopt a detailed work plan to assess and document the adequacy of internal control over financial reporting, continue steps to improve control processes as appropriate, validate through testing that controls are functioning as documented and implement a continuous reporting and improvement process for internal control over financial reporting.

We currently have limited accounting personnel and we have begun the process of evaluating the adequacy of our accounting personnel staffing level and other matters related to our internal control over financial reporting. Despite our efforts, there is a risk that we will not be able to conclude, within the prescribed timeframe or at all, that our internal control over financial reporting is effective as required by Section 404. If we identify one or more material weaknesses, it could result in an adverse reaction in the financial markets due to a loss of confidence in the reliability of our financial statements. As a result, the market price of our ordinary shares could be negatively affected, and we could become subject to litigation including shareholder suits or investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC or other regulatory authorities, which could require additional financial and management resources.

The market price of our ordinary shares could be highly volatile and may fluctuate substantially as a result of many factors, including:

In addition, the stock markets have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations. Broad market and industry factors may materially harm the market price of our ordinary shares, regardless of our operating performance. In the past, following periods of volatility in the market price of a company’s securities, securities class

action litigation has often been instituted against that company. If we were involved in any similar litigation we could incur substantial costs and our management’s attention and resources could be diverted.

An active trading market may not be sustained for our ordinary shares. The lack of an active market may impair your ability to sell your shares at the time you wish to sell them or at a price that you consider reasonable. An inactive market may also impair our ability to raise capital by selling ordinary shares and may impair our ability to acquire other companies by using our shares as consideration.

As of June 30, 2021, we have 210,891,354 ordinary shares outstanding. Subsequent to June 30, 2021, we will issue additional ordinary shares in connection with the Connexity Acquisition. Sales by us or our shareholders of a substantial number of ordinary shares, the issuance of ordinary shares as consideration for acquisitions, or the perception that these sales might occur, could cause the market price of our ordinary shares to decline or could impair our ability to raise capital through a future sale of, or pay for acquisitions using, our equity securities.

As of June 30, 2021, we had 31,932,902 shares available for future grant under our share option plans and 70,279,619 ordinary shares that were subject to share options and restricted share units. Of this amount, 34,259,127 are vested and/or exercisable.

We have never declared or paid any dividends on our ordinary shares. We do not anticipate paying any dividends in the foreseeable future. We currently intend to retain future earnings, if any, to finance operations and expand our business.

Our board of directors has sole discretion over whether to pay dividends. If our board of directors decides to pay dividends, the form, frequency and amount will depend upon our future operations and earnings, capital requirements and surplus, general financial condition, contractual restrictions and other factors that our directors may deem relevant. In addition, the Israel Companies Law imposes restrictions on our ability to declare and pay dividends. Payment of dividends may also be subject to Israeli withholding taxes.

The trading market for our ordinary shares is and will be influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us or our business. If no or few securities or industry analysts commence coverage of us, the trading price for our ordinary shares would be negatively impacted. In the event we obtain securities or industry analyst coverage, if any of the analysts who cover us issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding us, our business model, our intellectual property or our stock performance, or if our results of operations fail to meet the expectations of analysts, our stock price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline.

If any of Taboola’s large shareholders or members of its management were to sell substantial amounts of Taboola Ordinary Shares and/or Taboola Warrants in the public markets, or the market perceives that such sales may occur, this could have the effect of increasing the volatility in, and put significant downward pressure on, the trading price of Taboola Ordinary Shares and/or Taboola Warrants. Any such volatility or decrease in the trading price of Taboola Ordinary Shares and/or Taboola Warrants could also adversely affect Taboola’s ability to raise capital through an issue of equity securities in the future.

Taboola may issue additional Taboola Ordinary Shares or other equity securities in the future in connection with, among other things, future capital raising and transactions and future acquisitions, without your approval in many circumstances. Taboola’s issuance of additional Taboola Ordinary Shares or other equity securities would have the following effects:

Under the terms of the public Warrants, Taboola may exercise the redemption right even if it is unable to register or qualify the underlying securities for sale under all applicable state securities laws. Redemption of the outstanding Taboola Warrants could force holders (i) to exercise the Taboola Warrants and pay the exercise price therefor at a time when it may be disadvantageous to do so, (ii) to sell the Taboola Warrants at the then-current market price when the holder might otherwise wish to hold its Taboola Warrants or (iii) to accept the nominal redemption price which, at the time the outstanding Taboola Warrants are called for redemption, is likely to be substantially less than the market value of the Taboola Warrants. The Taboola Warrants exchanged for ION Warrants that were issued in a private placement are not expected to be redeemable by Taboola so long as they are held by the Sponsors or their permitted transferees.

The exercise price of the Taboola Warrants issued in exchange for the outstanding ION Warrants is $11.50 per Class A Ordinary Share. There can be no assurance that the Taboola Warrants will be in the money following the time they become exercisable and prior to their expiration, and as such, the Taboola Warrants may expire worthless.

We are incorporated under the laws of the State of Israel, and our principal research and development facilities, including our major data centers, are located in Israel. Accordingly, political, economic and military conditions in Israel directly affect our business. Since the State of Israel was established in 1948, a number of armed conflicts have occurred between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In the event that our facilities are damaged as a result of hostile action or hostilities otherwise disrupt the ongoing operation of its facilities, our ability to deliver products to advertisers could be materially adversely affected.

Several countries, principally in the Middle East, still restrict doing business with Israel and Israeli companies, and additional countries may impose restrictions on doing business with Israel and Israeli companies if hostilities in Israel or political instability in the region continues or increases. Any hostilities involving Israel or the interruption or curtailment of trade between Israel and its present trading partners, or significant downturn in the economic or financial condition of Israel, could adversely affect our operations and product development, and could cause our sales to decrease.

In addition, many Israeli citizens are obligated to perform several days, and in some cases more, of annual military reserve duty each year until they reach the age of 40 (or older, for reservists who are military officers or who have certain occupations) and, in the event of a military conflict, may be called to active duty. In response to increases in terrorist activity, there have been periods of significant call-ups of military reservists. It is possible that there will be military reserve duty call-ups in the future. Our operations could be disrupted by such call-ups, particularly if such call-ups include the call-up of members of our management. Such disruption could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We were incorporated under Israeli law and the rights and responsibilities of our shareholders are governed by our articles of association and Israeli law. These rights and responsibilities differ in some respects from the rights and responsibilities of shareholders of U.S. and other non-Israeli corporations. In particular, a shareholder of an Israeli company has a duty to act in good faith and in a customary manner in exercising its rights and performing its obligations towards the company and other shareholders and to refrain from abusing its power in the company, including, among other things, in voting at the general meeting of shareholders on certain matters, such as an amendment to the company’s articles of association, an increase of the company’s authorized share capital, a merger of the company and approval of related party transactions that require shareholder approval. A shareholder also has a general duty to refrain from discriminating against other shareholders. In addition, a controlling shareholder or a shareholder who knows that it possesses the power to determine the outcome of a shareholders’ vote or to appoint or prevent the appointment of an office holder in the company has a duty to act in fairness towards the company. These provisions may be interpreted to impose additional obligations and liabilities on our shareholders that are not typically imposed on shareholders of U.S. corporations.

Provisions of Israeli law and our amended and restated articles of association could have the effect of delaying or preventing a change in control and may make it more difficult for a third-party to acquire us or our shareholders to elect different individuals to our board of directors, even if doing so would be considered to be beneficial by some of our shareholders, and may limit the price that investors may be willing to pay in the future for our ordinary shares. Among other things:

Further, Israeli tax considerations may make potential transactions undesirable to us or some of our shareholders whose country of residence does not have a tax treaty with Israel granting tax relief to such shareholders from Israeli tax. For example, Israeli tax law does not recognize tax-free share exchanges to the same extent as U.S. tax law. With respect to mergers, Israeli tax law allows for tax deferral in certain circumstances but makes the deferral contingent on the fulfillment of numerous conditions, including, a holding period of two years from the date of the transaction during which certain sales and dispositions of shares of the participating companies are restricted. Moreover, with

respect to certain share swap transactions, the tax deferral is limited in time, and when such time expires, the tax becomes payable even if no disposition of the shares has occurred.

Unless we agree otherwise, the competent courts of Tel Aviv, Israel shall be the exclusive forum for (i) any derivative action or proceeding brought on behalf of the Company, (ii) any action asserting a claim of breach of fiduciary duty owed by any director, officer or other employee of the Company to the Company or the Company’s shareholders, or (iii) any action asserting a claim arising pursuant to any provision of the Companies Law or the Israeli Securities Law. Such exclusive forum provision in our amended and restated articles of association will not relieve the Company of its duties to comply with federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder, and shareholders of the Company will not be deemed to have waived the Company’s compliance with these laws, rules and regulations. This exclusive forum provision may limit a shareholders’ ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum of its choosing for disputes with the Company or its directors or other employees which may discourage lawsuits against the Company, its directors, officers and employees. The foregoing exclusive forum provision is intended to apply to claims arising under Israeli Law and would not apply to claims for which the federal courts of the United States would have exclusive jurisdiction, whether by law or pursuant to our amended and restated articles of association, including claims under the Securities Act for which there is a separate exclusive forum provision in our amended and restated articles of association. See “—Our amended and restated articles of association provide that unless we consent to an alternate forum, the federal district courts of the United States shall be the exclusive forum of resolution of any claims arising under the Securities Act which may impose additional litigation costs on our shareholders.”

We currently have sales denominated in currencies other than the US dollar. In addition, we incur a portion of our operating expenses in British pounds, Euro, Israeli shekels, Turkish lira, Japanese Yen and Thai baht, among others. Any fluctuation in the exchange rates of these foreign currencies could negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. We have not previously engaged in foreign currency hedging. If we decide to hedge our foreign currency exposure, we may not be able to hedge effectively due to lack of experience, unreasonable costs or illiquid markets. In addition, those activities may be limited in the protection they provide us from foreign currency fluctuations and can themselves result in losses.

Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our current and prospective advertisers. Economic downturns or instability in political or market conditions may cause current or new advertisers to reduce their advertising budgets. Adverse economic conditions and general uncertainty about economic recovery are likely to affect our business prospects. This could expose us to increased credit risk on advertiser insertion orders, which, in turn, could negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, continued geopolitical turmoil in many parts of the world have, and may continue to, put pressure on global economic conditions, which could lead to reduced spending on advertising.

We intend to continue to make investments to support our business growth and may require additional funds to respond to business challenges, including the need to develop new features or enhance our platform, improve our operating infrastructure or acquire complementary businesses and technologies. Accordingly, we may need to engage in public or private equity, equity-linked or debt financings to secure additional funds. If we raise additional funds through future issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing stockholders could suffer significant

dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those of our existing stockholders. Any debt financing that we secure in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, including the ability to pay dividends. This may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business could be adversely affected.

Events beyond our control could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows. Disruption to our platform resulting from natural disasters, political events, war, terrorism, pandemics or other reasons could impair our ability to continue to provide uninterrupted platform service to our advertisers and digital properties. Similarly, disruptions in the operations of our key third-parties, such as data centers, servers or other technology providers, could have a material adverse effect on our business.

While we have disaster recovery arrangements in place, they have not been tested under actual disasters or similar events and may not effectively permit us to continue to provide our platform. If any of these events were to occur to our business, our business, results of operations, or financial condition could be adversely affected.

As of December 31, 2020, we have offices in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, Germany, Spain and France. Expansion into new international markets requires additional management attention and resources in order to tailor our solutions to the unique aspects of each country. In addition, we face the following additional risks associated with our expansion into international locations:

These risks could harm our international expansion efforts, which could have a materially adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations.

All of the ordinary shares offered by the Selling Securityholders pursuant to this prospectus will be sold by the Selling Securityholders for their respective amounts. We will not receive any of the proceeds from these sales.

We will receive up to an aggregate of approximately $82,512,500 from the exercise of the warrants, assuming the exercise in full of all such warrants for cash. We expect to use the net proceeds from the exercise of the warrants for general corporate purposes, which may include acquisitions and other business opportunities and the repayment of indebtedness. Our management will have broad discretion over the use of proceeds from the exercise of the warrants.

There is no assurance that the holders of the warrants will elect to exercise any or all of the warrants. To the extent that the warrants are exercised on a “cashless basis,” the amount of cash we would receive from the exercise of the warrants will decrease.

Our ordinary shares and warrants began trading on The Nasdaq Global Market (“Nasdaq”) under the symbols “TBLA” and “TBLAW,” respectively, on June 30, 2021. ION’s Class A ordinary shares, warrants, and units were previously listed on the NYSE under the symbols “ION,” “ION.WS,”and “ION.U,” respectively. ION’s Class A Ordinary Shares, warrants, and units each commenced separate public trading on June 30, 2021. ION’s units automatically separated into the component securities upon consummation of the Business Combination and, as a result, no longer trade as a separate security. Prior the Closing, each unit of ION consisted of one Class A Ordinary Share and one-fifth of one public warrant of ION, whereby each public warrant entitled the holder to purchase Class A Ordinary Shares at an exercise price of $11.50 per Class A Ordinary Share. Upon the closing of the Business Combination, ION’s Class A Ordinary Shares were converted into our ordinary shares. On September 28, 2021, the closing sale prices of our ordinary shares and warrants were $8.90 and $1.95, respectively. As of June 30, 2021, there were approximately 170 holders of record of our ordinary shares and 3 holders of record of our warrants. Such numbers do not include beneficial owners holding our securities through nominee names.

The following unaudited pro forma combined financial information present the combination of the financial information of ION, Connexity and Taboola, adjusted to give effect to the Business Combination and consummation of the Transactions, the completion of the PIPE transactions and the Connexity Acquisition. The following unaudited pro forma combined financial information has been prepared in accordance with Article 11 of Regulation S-X.

ION Acquisition Corp. 1 Ltd. (“ION”) was a blank check company formed under the laws of the Cayman Islands. ION was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses or entities. As of December 31, 2020, there was $259 million held in the Trust Account.

Connexity was founded in 1996 and is one of the largest independent e-Commerce media platforms in the open web, serving over 1,600 direct merchants, and 6,000 publishers. Connexity is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.

Taboola.com Ltd. (“Taboola”) was incorporated in the state of Israel on September 3, 2006. Taboola is a technology company that powers recommendations across the Open Web with an artificial intelligence-based, algorithmic engine developed over the thirteen years since the company’s founding. Taboola is headquartered in New York City.

The following unaudited pro forma combined balance sheet as of June 30, 2021 assumes that the Transactions and the Connexity Acquisition occurred on June 30, 2021. The unaudited pro forma combined statement of operations for the year ended December 31, 2020 and for the six months ended June 30, 2021 present pro forma effect to the Transactions and the Connexity Acquisition as if they had been completed on January 1, 2020.

The unaudited pro forma combined financial statements do not necessarily reflect what the combined company’s financial condition or results of operations would have been had the Transactions and the Connexity Acquisition occurred on the dates indicated. The unaudited pro forma combined financial information also may not be useful in predicting the future financial condition and results of operations of the combined company. The actual financial position and results of operations may differ significantly from the pro forma amounts reflected herein due to a variety of factors.

This information should be read together with ION’s, Connexity’s and Taboola’s audited financial statements and related notes, the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and other financial information included elsewhere in this registration statement/prospectus.

The ION Business Combination will be accounted for as a recapitalization, with no goodwill or other intangible assets recorded, in accordance with GAAP. It has been determined that Taboola was the accounting acquirer based on evaluation of the following facts and circumstances:

The Connexity Acquisition will be accounted for using the acquisition method of accounting in accordance with Accounting Standards Codification 805, Business Combinations (“ASC 805”), which requires, among other things, that the assets acquired and liabilities assumed be recognized at their fair values, with any excess of the purchase price over the estimated fair values of the identifiable net assets acquired recorded as goodwill. The valuation of the acquired assets as a result of the Connexity Acquisition presented herein is preliminary and subject to change. The unaudited pro forma adjustments, which are described in the accompanying notes, may be revised as additional

information becomes available and is evaluated. Therefore, it is likely that the actual adjustments will differ from the pro forma adjustments and it is possible the difference may be material. Taboola believes that these assumptions and methodologies provide a reasonable basis for presenting all of the significant effects of the Transactions based on information available to management at the time and that the pro forma adjustments give appropriate effect to those assumptions and are properly applied in the unaudited pro forma combined financial information. As part of the preparation of these unaudited pro forma combined financial statements, certain reclassifications were made to align Connexity’s and Taboola’s financial statement presentation. Upon completion of the Connexity Acquisition, management is performing a comprehensive review of Connexity’s and Taboola’s accounting policies. As a result of the review, management may identify differences between the accounting policies of the two entities which, when conformed, could have a material impact on the financial statements of the combined company following consummation of the Business Combination.

On January 25, 2021, Taboola entered into the Merger Agreement with ION and Merger Sub. Pursuant to the Merger Agreement, Merger Sub will merge with and into ION, with ION surviving the merger. As a result of the Business Combination, and upon consummation of the Transactions, ION will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Taboola, with the securityholders of ION becoming securityholders of Taboola.

The pro forma equity valuation of the combined company upon consummation of the Transactions is estimated to approximate $2.6 billion. Upon consummation of the Transactions, the securityholders of Taboola owned approximately 71% of the issued and outstanding (not on a fully-diluted basis) Taboola Ordinary Shares and the securityholders of ION and certain accredited investors purchasing PIPE Shares and Secondary Shares owned the remaining Taboola Ordinary Shares.

Pursuant to the Merger Agreement, immediately prior to at the effective time of the Business Combination (the “Effective Time”), (i) each preferred share, with no par value, of Taboola (each, a “Taboola Preferred Share”) was converted into ordinary shares, with no par value, of Taboola (each, a “Taboola Ordinary Share”) in accordance with Taboola’s organizational documents and (ii) immediately following such conversion but prior to the Effective Time, Taboola effected a stock split of each Taboola Ordinary Share into such number of Taboola Ordinary Shares calculated in accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement such that each Taboola Ordinary Share will have a value of $10.00 per share after giving effect to such stock split (the “Stock Split” and, together with the conversion of Taboola Preferred Shares, the “Capital Restructuring”).

Pursuant to the Merger Agreement, immediately prior to the Effective Time, each (i) Class B ordinary share, par value $0.0001 per share, of ION (“Class B Ordinary Shares”) was automatically converted into one (1) Class A ordinary share, par value $0.0001 per share, of ION (“Class A Ordinary Shares”) in accordance with the terms of ION’s organizational documents and, after giving effect to such automatic conversion, at the Effective Time and as a result of the Business Combination, each issued and outstanding Class A Ordinary Share was no longer outstanding and was automatically converted into the right of the holder thereof to receive one Taboola Ordinary Share after giving effect to the Capital Restructuring and (ii) issued and outstanding ION Warrants sold to the public and to ION’s sponsors in a private placement in connection with ION’s initial public offering (“ION Warrants”) were automatically and irrevocably assumed by Taboola and converted into a corresponding warrant for Taboola Ordinary Shares (“Taboola Warrants”) exercisable for Taboola Ordinary Shares. Immediately prior to the Effective Time, the Class A Ordinary Shares and the public ION Warrants comprising each issued and outstanding ION unit, consisting of one (1) Class A Ordinary Share and one-fifth (1/5th) of one (1) public ION Warrant, will be automatically separated and the holder thereof will be deemed to hold one (1) Class A Ordinary Share and one-fifth (1/5th) of one (1) public ION Warrant. No fractional public ION Warrants were issued in connection with such separation such that if a holder of such ION Units would be entitled to receive a fractional public ION Warrant upon such separation, the number of public ION Warrants to be issued to such holder upon such separation was rounded down to the nearest whole number of public ION Warrants.

Concurrently with and following the execution of the Merger Agreement, Taboola and certain accredited investors (“PIPE Investors”) entered into a series of subscription agreements (“Subscription Agreements”),

providing for the purchase by the PIPE Investors at the Effective Time of an aggregate of 13,500,000 Taboola Ordinary Shares (“PIPE Shares”) at a price per share of $10.00 (assuming the Stock Split has been effected), for gross proceeds to Taboola of $135,000,000 (collectively, the “PIPE”). The closing of the PIPE is conditioned upon the consummation of the Transactions.

Concurrently with and following the execution of the Merger Agreement, Taboola and certain accredited investors (the “Secondary Investors”) entered into share purchase agreements with certain shareholders of Taboola (the “Secondary Share Purchase Agreements”) pursuant which the Secondary Investors committed to purchase Taboola Ordinary Shares from certain shareholders of Taboola, and, under certain circumstances, from Taboola, an aggregate of up to 15,120,000 Taboola Ordinary Shares (the “Secondary Shares”) at a price per share of $10.00 (assuming the Stock Split has been effected), for gross proceeds of up to $151,200,000 (the “Secondary Purchases”).

The following represents the aggregate merger consideration issued (excluding the Secondary Shares) by Taboola:

The following summarizes the unaudited pro forma Taboola Ordinary Shares issued and outstanding (not on a fully-diluted basis), assuming no Warrants have been exercised and assuming the Minimum Cash Condition has not been waived:

The unaudited pro forma combined financial information has been prepared to give effect to the redemption by ION shareholders of 1,872,234 shares of ION’s Class A Ordinary Shares.

On July 22, 2021, Taboola entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement (the “Purchase Agreement”) by and among Taboola, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taboola (“Buyer”), Shop Management, LLC and, for certain specified sections of the Purchase Agreement, Taboola, pursuant to which Buyer agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of Shop Holding Corporation (“Connexity”) for approximately $800.0 million, subject to customary purchase price adjustments for working capital, the payment of existing Connexity debt, expenses and the other terms and conditions such as the holdback and retention plans and other indebtedness described in the Purchase Agreement. Based on June 30, 2021 balance sheet figures, the customary purchase price adjustments includes the payment of approximately $59.1 million in existing Connexity debt, expenses and the other terms and conditions such as the holdback and retention plans of approximately $70.3 million and other indebtedness of approximately $31.5 million, as described in the Purchase Agreement. Approximately $523.8 million will be paid in cash, using approximately $223.8 million from cash on hands and $300.0 million from committed debt financing. Approximately

$136.5 million of the Purchase Price is to be paid pursuant to the issuance of Taboola Ordinary Shares. An additional $30.3 million in equity consideration will be issued and is subject to retention by Taboola pursuant to certain holdback arrangements entered into with current employees of Connexity, to be delivered to such employees in installments over three years following the closing of the Connexity Acquisition, subject to continued employment by such persons with Taboola and an additional $40.0 million is expected to be paid in future retention equity incentive awards. The total equity consideration to be issued is $206.8 million. Since the $30.3 million in holdback equity consideration and the $40.0 million in separate equity incentive awards are contingent upon future services, each is excluded from the purchase price. The exact number of Taboola Ordinary Shares to be issued as equity consideration will depend on the volume weighted average price of Taboola’s stock over the five business days ending three business days prior to the closing of the Connexity Acquisition.

The following unaudited pro forma combined financial statements give effect to the Connexity Acquisition, including (i) an assumed issuance of $300.0 million of committed debt financing and (ii) an assumed issuance of up to $136.5 million of Taboola Ordinary Shares (assumed to be 16,610,396 Taboola Ordinary Shares, using an assumed price of $8.22 per share) (See Note 10 of Taboola's unaudited interim financial statements included elsewhere in this registration statement for more information).

The following unaudited pro forma combined balance sheet as of June 30, 2021 and the unaudited pro forma combined statement of operations for the year ended December 31, 2020 and the six months ended June 30, 2021 are based on the historical financial statements of ION, Connexity and Taboola. The unaudited pro forma adjustments are based on information currently available, assumptions, and estimates underlying the pro forma adjustments and are described in the accompanying notes. Actual results may differ materially from the assumptions used to present the accompanying unaudited pro forma combined financial information.

The unaudited pro forma combined financial information has been prepared to illustrate the effect of the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition and has been prepared for informational purposes only.

The historical consolidated financial statements of Taboola and the historical financial statements of ION and Connexity have been adjusted in the pro forma combined financial information to give effect to pro forma events that are (1) directly attributable to the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and Connexity Acquisition, (2) factually supportable and (3) with respect to the pro forma combined statement of income (loss), expected to have a continuing impact on the combined results following the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition. The adjustments presented in the unaudited pro forma combined financial information are based on currently available information and certain information that the management of Taboola believes is reasonable under the circumstances. The unaudited pro forma adjustments may be revised as additional information becomes available.

Taboola and ION did not have any historical relationship prior to the Transactions. Accordingly, no pro forma adjustments were required to eliminate activities between the companies.

With respect to the Connexity Acquisition no pro forma adjustments were required to eliminate activities between the companies.

The unaudited pro forma combined balance sheet as of June 30, 2021, assumes that the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition occurred on June 30, 2021. The unaudited pro forma combined statement of income (loss) for the year ended December 31, 2020, and for the six months ended June 30, 2021 presents pro forma effect to the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition as if they had been completed on January 1, 2020.

The unaudited pro forma combined balance sheet as of June 30, 2021 has been prepared using, and should be read in conjunction with, the following:

The unaudited pro forma combined statement of income (loss) for the year ended December 31, 2020 and the six months ended June 30, 2021 has been prepared using, and should be read in conjunction with, the following:

Management has made significant estimates and assumptions in its determination of the pro forma adjustments. As the unaudited pro forma combined financial information has been prepared based on these preliminary estimates, the final amounts recorded may differ materially from the information presented.

The unaudited pro forma combined financial information does not give effect to any anticipated synergies, operating efficiencies, tax savings, or cost savings that may be associated with the Transactions and Connexity Acquisition.

The pro forma adjustments reflecting the consummation of the Transactions and the Connexity Acquisition are based on certain currently available information and certain assumptions and methodologies that Taboola believes are reasonable under the circumstances. The unaudited pro forma adjustments, which are described in the accompanying notes, may be revised as additional information becomes available and is evaluated. Therefore, it is likely that the actual adjustments will differ from the pro forma adjustments and it is possible the difference may be material. Taboola believes that these assumptions and methodologies provide a reasonable basis for presenting all of the significant effects of the Transactions based on information available to management at the time and that the pro forma adjustments give appropriate effect to those assumptions and are properly applied in the unaudited pro forma combined financial information.

The unaudited pro forma combined financial information is not necessarily indicative of what the actual results of operations and financial position would have been had the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition taken place on the dates indicated, nor are they indicative of the future consolidated results of operations or financial position of the post-combination Company. They should be read in conjunction with the historical financial statements and notes thereto of ION, Connexity and Taboola.

As part of the preparation of these unaudited pro forma combined financial statements, certain reclassifications were made to align ION’s and Taboola’s financial statement presentation. Upon completion of the Transactions, management is performing a comprehensive review of ION’s and Taboola’s accounting policies. As a result of the review, management may identify differences between the accounting policies of the two entities which, when conformed, could have a material impact on the financial statements of the combined company following consummation of the Business Combination. Based on its initial analysis, ION has identified the presentation differences, if any, that would have an impact on the unaudited pro forma combined financial information and recorded the necessary adjustments, if any.

As part of the preparation of these unaudited proforma combined financial statements, certain reclassifications were made to align Connexity’s and Taboola’s financial statement presentation. The Connexity Acquisition was closed on September 1, 2021. Management has not yet performed a comprehensive review of Connexity’s accounting policies and practices.

As a result of such review, management may identify differences between the accounting policy and practices of the two entities which, when conformed, could have a material impact on the financial statements of the combined company following consummation of the Business Combination.

The unaudited pro forma combined financial information has been prepared to illustrate the effect of the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition and has been prepared for informational purposes only. The historical financial statements have been adjusted in the unaudited pro forma combined financial information to give pro forma effect to events that are (1) directly attributable to the Transactions as well as the consummation of the PIPE and the Connexity Acquisition, (2) factually supportable, and (3) with respect to the statements of income (loss), expected to have a continuing impact on the results of the combined company following consummation of the Business Combination. ION and Taboola have not had any historical relationship prior to the Business Combination. Accordingly, no pro forma adjustments were required to eliminate activities between the companies. With respect to the Connexity Acquisition no pro forma adjustments were required to eliminate activities between the companies.

The unaudited pro forma combined provision for income taxes does not necessarily reflect the amounts that would have resulted had the combined company following consummation of the Business Combination and other transactions filed consolidated income tax returns during the periods presented.

The unaudited pro forma basic and diluted earnings per share amounts presented in the unaudited pro forma combined statements of income (loss) are based upon the number of ION’s shares outstanding, that were converted into Taboola shares in the Business Combination, the conversion of each outstanding Taboola convertible preferred share into Taboola Ordinary Shares in accordance with Taboola’s organizational documents, assuming the

Transactions occurred on January 1, 2020, as well as the assumed issuance of $136.5 million of Taboola Ordinary Shares (assumed to be 16,610 thousands shares of Taboola Ordinary Shares, using an assumed price of $8.22 per share).

The adjustments included in the unaudited pro forma combined balance sheets as of June 30, 2021 are as follows:

Net income (loss) per share calculated using the historical weighted average shares outstanding, and the issuance of additional shares in connection with the Transactions, the PIPE consummation and Connexity Acquisition, assuming the shares were outstanding since January 1, 2020. As the Transactions, the PIPE consummation and the Connexity Acquisition are being reflected as if they had occurred at the beginning of the period presented, the calculation of weighted average shares outstanding for basic and diluted net loss per share assumes that the shares issuable relating to the Transactions, the PIPE consummation and the Connexity Acquisition have been outstanding for the entire period presented. With respect to the shares that were redeemed, this calculation is retroactively adjusted to eliminate such shares for the entire period.

Represents the net income (loss) per share calculated using the historical weighted average shares outstanding, and the issuance of additional shares in connection with the Business Combination and the Connexity Acquisition as well as the conversion of each outstanding Taboola convertible preferred share into Taboola Ordinary Shares in accordance with Taboola’s organizational documents, and the RSU that were subject to the consummation of a Merger/Sale or an IPO which was satisfied upon Taboola becoming a publicly-traded company assuming the shares were outstanding since January 1, 2020. As the Business Combination and the Connexity Acquisition are being reflected as if it had occurred at the beginning of the period presented, the calculation of weighted average shares outstanding for basic and diluted net loss per share assumes that the shares issuable relating to the Business Combination have been outstanding for the entire period presented.

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with Taboola’s audited consolidated financial statements and the related notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus and the pro forma financial information as of and for the year ended December 31, 2020 under the heading “Unaudited Pro Forma Combined Financial Information” included elsewhere in this registration statement. Some of the information contained in this discussion and analysis is set forth elsewhere in this prospectus, including information with respect to Taboola’s plans and strategy for Taboola’s business, and includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. As a result of many factors, including those factors set forth in the section titled “Risk Factors” and “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” Taboola’s actual results could differ materially from the results described in or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in the following discussion and analysis. Throughout this section, unless otherwise noted or the context requires otherwise, “we,” “us,” “our” and the “Company” refer to Taboola and its consolidated subsidiaries, and in references to monetary amounts, “dollars” and “$” refer to U.S. Dollars, and “NIS” to refers to New Israeli Shekels.

Taboola is a technology company that powers recommendations across the Open Web with an artificial intelligence, or AI-based, algorithmic engine that we have developed over the past 13 years.

We think of ourselves as a search engine, but in reverse — instead of expecting people to search for information, we recommend information to people. You’ve seen us before: we partner with websites, devices, and mobile apps, which we collectively refer to as “digital properties”, to recommend editorial content and advertisements on the Open Web, outside of the closed ecosystems of the walled gardens such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Digital properties use our recommendation platform to achieve their business goals, such as driving new audiences to their sites and apps, or increasing engagement on site — and we don’t charge them for these services. We also provide a meaningful monetization opportunity to digital properties by surfacing paid recommendations by advertisers. Unlike walled gardens, we are a business-to-business, or B2B, company with no competing consumer interests. We only interact with consumers through our partners’ digital properties, hence we do not compete with our partners for user attention. Our motivations are aligned. When our partners win, we win, and we grow together.

We empower advertisers to leverage our AI-powered recommendation platform to reach targeted audiences, utilizing effective, native ad-formats across digital properties. We generate revenues when people click on or, in some cases, view the ads that appear within our recommendation platform. Advertisers pay us for those clicks or impressions and we share the resulting revenue with the digital properties who display those ads.

Our powerful recommendation platform was built to address a technology challenge of significant complexity: predicting which recommendations users would be interested in, without explicit intent data or social media profiles. Search advertising platforms have access, at a minimum, to users’ search queries, which indicates intent, while social media advertising platforms have access to rich personal profiles created by users. In contrast, we base our recommendations on an extensive dataset of context and user behavior derived from the intersection of thousands of digital properties and millions of recommended items, including ads and editorial content.

Our annual Revenues grew to $1,188.9 million in 2020, from $1,093.8 million in 2019 and $909.2 million in 2018. Over the same three years, our Gross profit grew to $319.5 million, from $232.0 million and $234.2 million, and our ex-TAC Gross Profit grew to $382.4 million, from $295.8 million and $281.5 million, respectively. Our Net income (loss) for the same three years was $8.5 million, ($28.0) million and $10.7 million, respectively, while our Adjusted EBITDA was $106.2 million, $34.1 million and $66.9 million, respectively. For more information about ex-TAC Gross Profit and Adjusted EBITDA, see “Taboola’s Management’s Business Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Non-GAAP Financial Measures.”

On January 25, 2021, we and one of our subsidiaries entered into a Merger Agreement with ION Acquisition Corp. 1 Ltd. Under that agreement, our subsidiary merged with and into ION, with ION continuing as the surviving company and becoming our direct, wholly-owned subsidiary. The Merger Agreement and the related transactions were unanimously approved by both our board of directors and the Board. The Business Combination closed June 29, 2021 and our ordinary shares and warrants began trading on the NASDAQ on June 30, 2021. In connection with the

Merger Agreement, we also obtained commitments for the purchase in private transactions which closed concurrently with the Business Combination of approximately $285 million of our ordinary shares, of which approximately $150 million was purchased directly from certain of our existing shareholders, primarily from early investors.

For further information please refer to the “Unaudited Pro Forma Combined Financial Information.”

We believe that our performance and future success depend on several factors that present significant opportunities for us but also pose risks and challenges, including those discussed below and in the section entitled “Risk Factors.”

We have a robust network of digital property partners under contracts that provide exclusivity and cover multiple years at inception. These agreements typically require that our code be integrated on the digital property web page because of the nature of providing both editorial and paid recommendations. This means that in the vast majority of our business, we do not bid for ad placements, as traditionally happens in the advertising technology space, but rather see all users that visit the pages on which we appear. This is true across all platforms and in all geographies. Due to our multi-year exclusive contracts and high retention rates, our supply is relatively consistent and predictable. We had approximately 9,000, 7,000 and 6,000 digital property partners in the fourth quarter of 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively.

We have a strong record of growing the revenue generated from our digital property partners. We grow our digital property partner relationships in four ways. First, we grow the revenue from these partnerships by increasing our yield over time. We do this by improving our algorithms, expanding our advertiser base and increasing the amount of data that helps target our ads. Second, we continuously innovate with new product offerings and features that increase revenue. Third, we innovate by launching new advertising formats. Fourth, we work closely with our digital property partners to find new placements and page types where we can help them drive more revenue.

We have two primary models for sharing revenue with digital property partners. The most common model is a straight revenue share model. In this model, we agree to pay our partner a fixed percentage of the revenue that we generate from advertisements placed on their digital properties. The second model includes guarantees. Under this model, we pay our partners the greater of a fixed percentage of the revenue we generate and a guaranteed amount per thousand page views. In the past, we have and may continue to be required to make significant payments under these guarantees.

We have a large and growing network of advertisers, across multiple verticals. We had approximately 13,000, 12,000 and 10,000 advertiser clients working with us directly, or through advertising agencies, worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. A large portion of our revenue comes from advertisers with specific performance goals, such as obtaining subscribers for email newsletters or acquiring leads for product offerings. These performance advertisers use our service when they obtain a sufficient return on ad spend to justify their ad spend. We grow the revenue from performance advertisers in three ways. First, we improve the performance of our network by developing new product features, improving our algorithms and optimizing our supply. Second, we secure increased budgets from existing advertisers by offering new ad formats and helping them achieve additional goals. Third, we grow our overall advertiser base by bringing on new advertisers that we have not worked with previously. In addition to our core performance advertisers, video brand advertisers are a small but growing portion of our revenue.

One way that we grow our revenue is by increasing the yield on our network, which is a general term for the revenue that we make per advertising placement. Because we generally fill close to 100% of advertising impressions available, yield is generally not affected by changing fill rates, but rather is impacted in four ways. First, we increase our yield by improving the algorithms that select the right ad for a particular user in a particular context.

These algorithms are based on Deep Learning technology and are a key competitive advantage. Second, we continuously innovate and develop new product offerings and features for advertisers, which help increase their

success rates on our network and improve yield. Third, as we grow our advertiser base and mix of advertisers, including adding advertisers able to pay higher rates, our yields increase because of increasing competitive pressure in our auction. Finally, we increase our yield by optimizing the way we work with digital properties, including changing formats and placements. Increasing yield drives higher revenues on all digital property partners. Increasing yield also generally increases margins for ex-TAC Gross Profit, a non-GAAP measure, for those digital property partners to whom we are paying guarantees.

We view research and development expenditures as investments that help grow our business over time. These investments, which are primarily in the form of employee salaries and related expenditures and hardware infrastructure, can be broken into two categories. This first category includes product innovations that extend the capabilities of our current product offerings and help us expand into completely new markets. This includes heavy investment in AI (specifically Deep Learning) in the form of server purchases and expenses for data scientists. This category of investment is important to maintain the growth of the business but can also generally be adjusted up or down based on management’s perception of the potential value of different investment options. The second category of investments are those that are necessary to maintain our core business. These investments include items such as purchasing servers and other infrastructure necessary to handle increasing loads of recommendations that need to be served, as well as the people necessary to maintain the value delivered to our customers and digital property partners, such as investments in code maintenance for our existing products. This type of investment scales at a slower rate than the growth of our core business.

The global advertising industry has historically been characterized by seasonal trends that also apply to the digital advertising ecosystem in which we operate. In particular, advertisers have historically spent relatively more in the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with the year-end holiday shopping season, and relatively less in the first quarter. We expect these seasonality trends to continue, and our operating results will be affected by those trends with revenue and margins being seasonally strongest in the fourth quarter and seasonally weakest in the first quarter.

We are subject to U.S. and international laws and regulations regarding data privacy, digital advertising and the collection of user data. In addition, large Internet and technology companies such as Google and Apple are making their own decisions as to how to protect consumer privacy, which impacts the whole digital ecosystem. Because we power editorial recommendations, digital properties typically embed our code directly on their web pages. This makes us less susceptible to many of these regulations and industry trends because we are able to drop first party cookies. In addition, because of this integration on our partners’ pages, we have rich contextual information to use to further refine the targeting of our recommendations.

In December 2019, COVID-19 was first reported to the World Health Organization, or WHO, and in January 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency. In March 2020, the WHO characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 initially significantly impacted the digital advertising industry, reducing advertising budgets, lowering ad rates and leading advertisers to defer planned ad campaigns.

We experienced a notable decline in advertising rates soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we attribute an approximately 12% reduction in our second quarter of 2020 revenue to the pandemic. We took three steps to address the reduction in advertising rates, which resulted in a gradual recovery in revenue that continued throughout the remainder of the year. First, we worked with our digital property partners to optimize yield by focusing on revenue-generating enhancements. Second, we focused our sales efforts on finding advertisers that were still spending online and trying to reach consumers who were sheltering at home. This effort, combined with a return of spend from certain types of advertisers, allowed us to grow our advertiser base and increase yield. Finally, we continued our investment in our algorithms that help improve yields. After the reduction in advertising and rates in the first two quarters of 2020, we saw a strong recovery in our network yield in the third quarter. The gains in network yields we realized in the second half of 2020 continued into the first two quarters of 2021 and we expect network yields to increase during the second half of 2021 at rates consistent with pre-COVID historical levels.

As a result of the pandemic, we restricted employee travel, asked all non-essential personnel to work from home, cancelled physical participation in sales activities, meetings, events and conferences, which reduced our operating expenses. We also examined the efficiency and impact of expenditures across our business and found more efficient ways to work in many cases. This included imposing a hiring freeze while we worked to optimize the way we conducted business. As part of our close relationship with our digital property partners, certain of our partners that had guarantee compensation arrangements agreed to forgo their guarantee compensation and instead shift to 100% revenue share until yield recovered. In connection with these arrangements, for certain digital property partners, we extended their agreements. In the fourth quarter of 2020, we returned to guarantee arrangements with substantially all of the affected digital property partners and agreed with them to undo the 100% revenue share arrangement, reinstate the original payment terms, and make payments, retroactively, of the guarantee under the original compensation terms.

The ultimate societal and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic remains unknown. In particular, we cannot predict whether any worsening or continuation of the pandemic, or any resulting recession, will adversely affect our business.

We regularly monitor a number of metrics in order to measure our current performance and project our future performance. These metrics aid us in developing and refining our growth strategies and making strategic decisions.