 Hello and welcome to Euforum Talk Show. Our guest today is Adam Singuda, founder of Tabula. Welcome to the show Adam. Thanks for having me. Good morning. Good evening everyone. It must be a very good morning, very early morning in New York, right? 8 a.m. or so? Yeah, that's why you may see kids running around from time to time. I'm currently in my home soon in the office but yeah, so it's 8 a.m. here. So Adam, Tabula has completed 10 years now and we would like to know about your journey so far in terms of technological innovations, change in advertising, land escape and growth in Tabula's revenue in a decade. Yeah, I started 15 years ago. It's my first job with a vision to help drive growth in the open web and work with publishers in a way that's kind of similar to what we experience in all gardens. So when we go to TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, we see beautiful feeds that are relevant and personalized but what if there was a recommendation engine that could bring that same relevance and personalization to every website that we love, every app on our phone, every app on our connected TV. So it's a huge market. There's a big gap in terms of how we currently experience journalism in the open web and I'm very excited to be on this journey to kind of reinvent or reimagine the internet as we know it now. So it feels like we see on world gardens about entrusted websites that are so important in my opinion to the next generation. So we don't live in a world that people or children discover news and science and pharma and things of that nature on social networks versus going to website that are trusted and can help them make decisions. So we've been doing this for 15 years. Obviously India has a huge market for us, always has been and growing to be even more. So I'm excited to be here today. Sandram, I used to enter the public market in 2021 and then came 2022, it was quite a tumulus for everyone due to global constraints on economy. So how is 2023 treating you? Yeah, so obviously 2022 was not boring, that's for sure. So much like everyone, we, Tbilisi is a very global company, so we kind of saw the effect of just the decline in advertising throughout 2022 in different waves. So in Europe, actually driven by the war, that was the very beginning. And that was roughly the second quarter of last year of 2022 is when we start seeing sort of the softness and then about a quarter afterwards, we saw that in the US. And I believe actually almost a quarter afterwards, we start seeing that in Asia. So you know, say kind of like Q4 towards the end of the second, half of the second year last year. So we kind of saw the waves, you know, I think, I think, you know, much like everyone in many ways, it kind of forces us to be a better version of ourselves, you know, to try to think about how do you drive growth in times of softness in the market. And you know, it happened to us also in the pandemic, if you go back, you know, to when the pandemic happened for the very first time, there was the sort of decline overnight, you know, and everyone kind of was like, we're freezing. But then we were able to work with our publishers and advertisers and find growth. So, so in many ways, it's kind of forces us as a company and as a team to be focused, to spend more time with our publishers and advertisers, we call it zero distance, you know, kind of like make it personal, get to know your partners even more and see what are the things that, you know, they need and they would consider to drive growth. I think right now, you know, we're seeing it, it looks like it's roughly, we assume, you know, as a public company, the guidance we've given is that we assume it's flat, which means it's kind of like through 2023, we assume it's not going to get much better. It's not going to get much worse, kind of going to be the same, which I hope is a conservative assumption. But that that's our assumption, you know, so that we operate the business. And with our partners, assuming the world is sort of flat. And can you please elaborate on, you know, current trends in advertising, digital advertising? Yeah, there's a few, you know, I think fascinating trends that are actually great in my opinion to the open web and journalism. The first one is the rise of privacy. So we're seeing that, you know, Apple back in 2017, start blocking third party cookies. And actually, that was a source of growth. It was the beginning of social growth to companies that were more contextual, like Tabula, but not the only one. But that was the beginning. And actually, if you look at our investor deck, you'll see that our yield, which yield means how much revenue we're able to generate per thousand impressions to publishers went up on Safari since they start blocking cookies. But if you take a step back and you're asking yourself what is privacy means, it means that we will not be able to track consumers like, you know, social companies have been doing for a decade. We've all seen this ad that's kind of like hunts us down and follows us in a bit of a creepy way, because we've been on the website. And I think, you know, 10 years from now, people will be shocked that there used to be such tracking for consumers. So I think it's a good thing for consumers, because it makes it safer for them. And that's important. But even more important is that for publishers, by definition, publishers have the context. What am I reading as a proxy for who I am? So not necessarily my gender or my age, but whether what what is my current situation based on what am I reading about, and could very much change throughout the day or throughout the week. But if I'm reading about something that could be a very strong contextual signal to say people who read about that also did those things. And I think that's going to be a whole new beginning for advertising in a community looking to become more contextual. And I hope and believe that this will be a social growth for publishers that should be able to attract those budgets. So that's the first trend. The second trend is e-commerce. E-commerce is on the rise. We're seeing it at the table in a big way. But if you think about consumers working from home, all of us, we're not going to the stores we used to. We want to make decisions. We need a trusted source to help us make decisions. I just bought for my children a trampoline here, like a small trampoline outside. I'm not an expert in trampolines. I wouldn't know what to buy and what to know. And so I used the New York Times Wirecutter to review different trampolines. So that's just an example. But all of us, we've been there before, we want to know which mortgage to take, which insurance to buy, which fridge to buy to the house. We want to trust that source of information. I think publishers can own that space. An alternative to Amazon. Make decisions about what to buy, not on necessarily a retail website like Amazon, but rather on publishers I love and trust, my local site, my national site. So that's the second trend. And in general, the third one is AI. We've seen it with Chej GPT as consumers, but now we're kind of shocked about how that's so powerful, but we've been using AI for a long time. If you drive certain cars at it on our TV, if you have Netflix, you have it. So we've seen AI kind of in the back, but we haven't seen AI in the front like we see now with Chej GPT. But I think it's going to be a cultural change because we'll see AI integrated much more in the future across different services and publishers' home pages on different apps we have on our phones. So I think AI is going to be a much bigger part of our life. So these are the three trends I'm kind of envisioning. Adam, actually Chej GPT was my next question. So I would like to understand how is Tabula using Chej GPT, deep learning and AI? I mean, I know you have been using these platforms for a long time, but what is the status as of now? So AI has also come up. Right. So AI we've been using for years. We've switched from machine learning to deep learning about five or six years ago. And that basically means that we were able to simplify this to serve our accommodations in a much greater way. So it's more relevant for consumers with the rise of data that we could store and analyze over a longer period of time and computing power that became more available to us over the last seven years. Deep learning, which is really the implementation of AI, was in use by Tabula for many years now. I think with Chej GPT and Generative AI in general, what we've announced is that we're testing kind of helping our advertisers. That's our current beta. If you're an advertiser, Tabula has about 18,000 advertisers who work with us directly. That means they open an account on Tabula via cell service or maybe they have an account manager. And today they have to come up with titles for campaigns that run on Tabula. So let's go back to the insurance example I used before. And I'm asking myself, what would be the best title and the best image for my insurance campaign? So I can guess, I can try to make an educated guess. But it's kind of like there's a chasm here because I don't really know. And I wish I knew what worked for other insurance advertisers so that I can learn from the past experience. So that's what we're doing with Generative AI. We're prompting it with past creatives that we have seen to be successful for similar advertisers. And then we were able to suggest in real-time titles and images to new advertisers or existing advertisers with new campaigns so they can have a better chance to succeed. Creative is so important as we know. As human beings, we're making decisions in less than a second based on what we see and based on what it feels like. So it is an important part of the puzzle. So we're using it for that. Over time, I think we'll use it. I don't think Generative AI will replace writers. I think it's going to make them more productive. I suspect we'll be able to hire more writers because we'll be able to know what to write and how to be more productive. So over time, I think that we'll be able to maybe incorporate Generative AI also when it comes to helping our publishers write certain things and suggest certain things. So we're not doing that just yet. But I think there's a chance of that as well. Adam, I guess you have partnered with Yahoo for 30 years, which has been considered a very long period considering a fast-changing pace of technology and advertising landscape. How much revenue do we expect out of this partnership in the next five years, if I ask? Yeah. So what we shared, first of all, we're very excited about it. We just had last week kind of an investor session day with the CEO and CFO of Yahoo and our president, COO and CFO. It was fantastic. It was a couple of hours with our analysts and investors in the room. It was great. We're able to talk about the vision of the opportunity, the partnership, the integration planning. So in terms of financials, what we've shared, and I'll tell you why I'm excited about it, we've shared that if Yahoo was live on tabula throughout 2022, it would have added a billion dollars in revenue, $150 million in adjusted EBITDA, and $80 million of free cash flow. So it's very significant. Obviously, it's very creative to our investors who buy the tabula stock. But beyond that, why the reason I like it is because it's going to make tabula on a run-with basis about $2.5 billion a year revenue. And it's great for both publishers and advertisers. If you're working with tabula now as a publisher, Yahoo is going to bring thousands of new advertisers that will buy tabula, which means your revenue should go up just because you work with tabula, because Yahoo's advertisers will start buying the tabula network. That's great. It's also going to innovate on the product side, which we will make available to all of our networks. So from the publisher perspective, I've had many conversations with publishers that are very excited once this is launched. From the advertiser perspective, which is maybe even more exciting. The biggest challenge I think the open web journalism has now when it comes to the advertising community is that it's very easy to buy Google search. You go to Google, you buy the entire, you buy a lot of search. It's very easy to buy social. You go to Facebook, you buy Facebook. It's very hard to buy the open web. There's no Google for the internet. There's no Google. One great company that loves publishers, that is dedicated to publishers, that is obsessed with journalism and can offer advertisers one home, one place with a huge scale. That doesn't exist. So for me, one of the reasons I like it so much is because it makes tabula the biggest in the open web. It makes us closer to being a must buy for advertisers in the open web, which means that I hope it will create a tsunami of goodness or new advertisers coming to tabula and to our publisher sites. So Yahoo is just one significant step forward on our mission and vision to become kind of the wall guarded but good for the open web and bring that scale advertisers one so that publishers can absorb all that growth. We said that it's going to start ramping up towards the second half of this year, 2023, and it's going to be fully launched no later than mid of 2024. And we're hard at work to make it launch faster. You're working with a lot of news publishers and most of them are currently facing a drop in traffic and ad revenue due to various reasons, I mean, such as changes in Google algorithms and maybe entry of chat GPT and burn. What is your suggestion and solutions for them? Yeah, I think that for the we haven't seen a huge drop in traffic. We've seen obviously dropping meals because of the advertiser softness, but the concept of audience growth in my opinion. So it was when I think about if I take a step back about your question, I think that publishers have the opportunity to do a variety of things. One, build a direct relationship with our consumers via emails, notifications and other offers that users can connect. That's enough to be paid subscription. I think that is a harder bar. That's a higher bar. But I think when it comes to emails, notifications, and things of that nature, there's an opportunity to just stay in touch and build connection. And that that can help you bring people back. The second thing we're doing with our publishers is that we're partnering with companies like Samsung, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi and other OEMs so that we can bring our publishers content to every Android device. If you think about it, Apple has news on almost every Apple device, but Android, which has a billion devices a year has yet to fully done it. So you see it a little longer and a little less in some markets, but there's huge opportunity here to bring people kind of back. And lastly, I think editorial teams who really are responsible for the main product, the content. I think it can do a lot to incorporate data and AI to know how to bring people back and new people in. So I'll give an example. We've invested more than five years in something called Newsroom, which helps our publishers and editors and writers to know when someone leaves your website in exchange for media or someone goes go read your content all the time, but then from time to time, they leave. When they leave, what do they read about? When they're on the internet, when they're not on your site, your most loyal readers, why do they leave you and what do they read that that is maybe not on your site? And then you might say, wait a second, my most loyal people, people who come here every day, when they leave us, I see that 30% of the time they read about privacy. Maybe we should write more about privacy so they stick around and maybe even more of them will come. So we have now about 2000 editors and writers using that globally. And I love it because it's such a data driven approach driven by writers and editors for writers and editors. This is exactly what I said earlier. It's about empowering editors and writers with AI and data so they can be a super version of themselves. And that will help that we see already helps publishers get more SEO traffic, more social traffic, increased pages per session. So I think the editorial team and it's a cultural change because we haven't, you know, 10 years ago, we didn't have access to all this data and AI. Now we do. So I think publishers and editorial team can lean in, take risks, keep the integrity of the publisher, but take advantage of data and AI that can help them bring more people in. And those are already in, get them to read more to get more stickiness. So another thing is also, you know, smartphone growth and internet penetration that has plateaued in India. So and also advertising spend is also, you know, kind of, you know, on and they are not also not growing with the same pace as they were going, you know, in 2021 or maybe 2020. I'm talking about digital advertising spend. How are these factors affecting the bullies growth in India? Yeah, I think it's very hard to compare 2020 and 2021, the pandemic years, which were massive digital acceleration in many ways. It's kind of brought us into the future, right? Advertisers, we had no choice because of the pandemic became digital overnight. And we've seen, you know, an excess amount of budgets and acceleration. So those were great two years. And I don't think we'll see those years again, it will take some time to get back to those years. We, you know, some of it will happen naturally because the market will recover. And I don't know if this is a 2023, 2024, who knows. I like to be conservative and operate the business under the assumption that things might last for a long time, but we still want to be great and awesome, right? So, so my assumption is, let's, you know, it will get better over time naturally. But in the meantime, I think what we have to do is to help advertisers be more successful with publishers so that it so it becomes irresponsible not to spend dollars with publishers. And that is investment on technology, you know, performance advertising technology, making data more available. We spoke earlier about contextual data. Publishers can, I think, write more content that has high intent, such as product reviews, you know, different services consumers want. And advertisers love to be next to that. So there's a lot of opportunity for publishers to increase the value they can create for advertisers. Companies like Tabula can do that too, by investing in technology and data to make it available so that we'll see that acceleration again. So, so all of this is to say, I think it's hard to compare 2023 to 2021, just because those were ridiculous great years that I'm not even sure we deserve. You know, just it was a gift. It was a gift. Now we have to work hard to deserve that luck again. You know, you always have to remind yourself as you're, as you want to be humble, you know, is that, you know, no one deserves to be successful. Sometimes we're lucky, like 2020, 2021, we don't have to do anything and we're just successful because it comes our way. But most of the time, you have to be, you have to work hard. You have to invest in culture and people and build great management teams. You have to, you know, just lean in a bit more than maybe your competition so that you're able to drive better results. So I think we're going to have to work a little harder for all of us as a community in an industry to see that growth again. But I'm convinced it's happening. It's just going to be a bit of a hard work and a lot of working together, you know, with our partners, with our employees, a lot of empathy and zero distance to each other. And I'm talking about the larger picture. So we'd like to know how is native advertising placed in digital ad market, which is still largely driven by wall gardens. Yeah, I it's so just to, you know, to take a stab back again, the open web is about 70 billion dollars market. Tabool has about one and a half billion dollars out of 70. With Yahoo, we're two and a half run rate. So we're the biggest in our space, but still a small part. What's interesting is that most of the open web, most of the 70 billion dollars is not native advertising, it's still display ads. Display ads were invented 30 years ago when DVD was invented. When Tamaguchi was invented. It's and in fact, since then, we haven't seen display ads anywhere else but the open web. Did you ever see this played on a Google search page? No. Did you ever see display ad on Twitter? No. Did you ever see display ad on the homepage of Amazon? No. On Facebook? No. On Instagram? No. On TikTok? No. Where's the only place to see display ads on publisher websites? So I again, I am convinced that 10 years from now, we might have no display ads. We might have something left, but I think most of it will be replaced with personalized recommendations that are relevant using AI and data and also offer advertisers and native advertising experience like they currently buy from all these great companies. Advertisers now, when they want to buy ads from Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and Twitter and Pinterest and Amazon, it's all native ads. It's only when they want to buy on the open web, they have to buy 250 by 250. So, which means a size certain size of a banner. So I think, I think it's great. I mean, I think it's worth the beginning of a revolution, you know, of how advertising will be presented in open web. And Tabula hopefully will be leading that revolution. So I think it's still a small part of the internet, open web, I mean, but consumers spend and now in half a day on TikTok, you never see one banner. Why should they see banners on publisher sites? None of us, anyone listening to this interview or reading the article, if you ask yourself, when was the last time you clicked on a banner? And I would argue you don't remember. You don't remember the last time you clicked, but you probably remember the last time you maybe clicked on an Instagram ad and you maybe even bought something because it's pretty good. And you probably remember when you went to Amazon, how it's, you know, when they said recommended to you sponsored by this retailer, you probably clicked on it. It's pretty good. Or, and all of us click on Google search ads all the time. It's pretty good. You search for something, it's there, it's relevant, we click on it. So ads are actually great if they are great. So I'm excited about it. It's a smaller portion. It's growing, but it's on us, you know, companies like Tabula and publishers to kind of keep trying new placements, middle article, homepage, try to slowly kind of, you know, replace traditional ads with personalized, organic and paid experiences. Okay. And I guess about four years ago, Tabula used to charge, you know, about 30% less than Google, according to your press release. Can you share the current specifics? Charge less than Google. I'm not sure what that means. What do you mean charge less than Google? I mean charge for native advertising. So Tabula is a marketplace. We don't really charge, so publishers, we never charge publishers at all. We just share revenue with publishers based on what we were generating. And, and then we give at no cost all of the services I mentioned up until now, editorial technologies, analytics, subscription services, Tabula news, to Android OEMs, all of that is at no cost. We'll never charge publishers. It's on the Tabula flag. We will never, we'll always be aligned to our publisher partners and grow with them as a win-win approach. So publishers, we never charge. Advertisers, we charge on a most of the time on a per-click basis. Anyway, that's what you meant. But so it's a marketplace. Publishers, advertisers pay us based on how much value they're able to see from the Tabula campaign. So our goal as a company is to improve the technology such that they will be motivated to increase the price, the CPC, which will help us pay publishers even more. And we do that by investigating technology and data mostly. And that's probably our number one investment as a company, making at performance advertisers even more successful. So the more we are doing a good job, we should expect an experience yields going up. So that's, that's, so that's how we see it. We don't actually, there's no specific price. It's all about marketplace. It goes up and down based on how much value we're able to create. And now the last question. What are your expansion plans for India? Yeah, so up and right, big, big and bigger. So let me just say that we're celebrating 10 years in India out of 15 years Tabula has been around. So it's pretty great. We have more than 100 people Tabula, we're calling Tabulars working in India, which is, which is, you know, it's a good amount of people for us. We're still up, you know, we're almost 2000 people in the company. So that's a big deal for us. We work, we're working with amazing publishing. So some of them are, you know, this part, some of our best friends, you know, obviously, you know, you know, many of them, but you know, NDTV, India Today, my first publisher call in Asia Pacific. Okay, that was 10, 10 years ago, or so, was with India Sun Time. I still remember that call. I was in Tel Aviv and ran back with our head of revenue was with me, just joined the company. And I told him, come, we're talking to India Sun Time. And he said, Okay, great, what are we pitching? I said, I don't know, let's get to know each other. And I remember that call like it was yesterday, you know, and actually just came back to Tabula right now. So we're very happy. So, so you know, we're having a great partnerships that at this point, our friendships and so much trust has been built. You have to remember that India is still early on in its journey, in my opinion. You have more than a billion people. But still, this is such a huge opportunity with, you know, different languages, and make it successful in, you know, in different markets of the market. So I think there's still a huge opportunity, it's very mobile only market. And obviously mobile is as a huge opportunity of growth and innovation. So, so I'm seeing, I'm seeing, you know, a lot of new opportunities with the agencies who are looking to diversify. I'm seeing a very young audience in India. You know, I think more than 600 million people are younger than 25 years old. That's awesome. That gives us kind of diverse audiences to try to experiment with different products. And, you know, imagine the future. Like I said, it's a big market, great publishers, the languages, which I think Tabula is doing a good job. But still, we have a lot of work to do, you know, to really bring advertisers to different markets. Happy holiday, everyone. Happy holidays. So that's also, you know, good, good timing to have this conversation. Break it season is coming up. So just, you know, a lot of, a lot of goodness, a lot of good energy and innovation mainly in a very big market. I think it's, we've been around for 10 years, but there's still a lot of growth for us there. I think I just one more question, which is your, you know, fastest growing market? Is it India? Which is the fastest growing? Yeah. You know, I would have to check the latest. No, we're probably company. I can't just say new things unless I check it and confirm it with my CFR that I can say it. So I will probably need to check it. Yeah, India is a fast growing market and we're investing a lot in it. I don't know if it's the fastest, but I should probably check and we can update afterwards for the readers. But I will say, like I said, India is early on, even though we've been 10 years in India and we're investing from an office, from people perspective, it's one of our top markets in terms of people on the ground, that's for sure. So early on, a lot of growth and a lot of innovation. And I will say thank you to many, if any publishers in India or advertisers are listening to this. Thank you for being so great and teaching us about relationship and trust first and commercial later. Thank you so much Adam for taking time out and talking to you for them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.