 Good evening everyone from the warm confines of Mumbai. I am here with Adam Singolda, the founder and CEO of Tabula. Adam is based in New York and as he tells me it's been a snowy morning there, it's been snowing overnight and he's just woken up to a white blanket of snow all around him. Adam, welcome to the show. This is our weekly Martech leadership series and we are very happy to have you on the show. For those of you, I'm sure none of you need an introduction to Tabula, but for those of you who might want to know a little bit more, just to give you a brief background, Tabula helps publishers drive engagement, advertisers to surface their content to the right audience at scale and helps people discover content they might like. Adam found this company a few years back and as we were discussing, he's also served in the Israeli military for a good seven years. That's a significant amount of time, Adam. He's now based in New York and he runs this company from there. Tabula is not a listed company, not yet at least. Their estimated revenues from what I've read are in the region of $1 billion. You can correct me if I'm wrong. In India, they work with a large number of publishers. I'm told the leading, some of the leading publishers like NDTV, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Times of India, India Rude, Danik Jagaran, Bhaskar, ABP, the Hindu and several others work with them. They also work with a lot of brands. Tabula was founded in Israel, as I mentioned, and they are currently headquartered in New York. They do currently 150 billion monthly recommendations and have almost 400 million unique visitors and more than one million content pieces that they put out. Adam, welcome to this interaction. Good to have you here. Before I get into the business that Tabula is into, tell us what's been going on. You work very closely with content publishers, both news and non-news alike. We've seen COVID has been an inflection point for digital news consumption in countries like India. Digital consumption of news as well as non-news is really gone up significantly. What are some four or five key trends you've seen in this increase in content consumption in the last few months? First, thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. For me, it's morning. A snowy morning, like I said. Overall, when it just started in March 15th, I think all of us just closed down and just wanted to see what's going to happen. People wanted to wait it off. We've seen two types of behaviors. The first one was people that hoped this will end and we'll go back to normal, whatever normal was. The second group was companies that realized that something will never go back and we're going to have to change. I think those two groups were very different. Those who did choose to change today, we're seeing them getting more success and things of that nature and I'll give you some specifics. Overall, there are a few things that we're seeing. The first one is that the user behavior changed completely. People are at home. They're leaning into a variety of different services, whether that's Disney Plus or HBO Max under TV, websites, subscription services, direct to the reporter. We've seen an increase in user attention. If you think of the user attention as an economy, it went up because we're home. We're not traveling. We're not commuting. Something was created and we're filling that gap with consumption of a variety of services. We're also not spending as we used to in terms of going to, we don't have our annual trip on Christmas and we're not going outside of our house like we used to to purchase things in stores. We're buying more online. This behavioral change from the user and spending perspective created a huge opportunity for both publishers and advertisers, publishers to interact and engage consumers a lot more. Advertisers to reach consumers in ways they never did. I think those two things actually will never go back. Even post-vaccine, post-pandemic, advertisers realized the opportunity to talk to the consumer directly and sell a product directly is something that users are ready for online education, online healthcare. These things we thought it would take 10 years for us to get there. In many ways, I feel like we're in 2030 already. Maybe we're even later than that because it would have taken us 10 years to adopt to the behavior we're seeing right now. So I think that's a huge opportunity and challenge for those who have not adopted to this. That's right. In fact, interesting point you make yesterday, Boston Consulting Group released a report in India that said digital advertising spends that were projected for the year 2023 will happen next year. So it gets pre-poned by two years and nobody has a sense on how much digital content consumption and adoption has got kind of fast track. Possibly three to four years. That's a guess. In countries like India where telecom service providers, one of the largest ones today or the largest one by a number of subscribers, Reliance Geo launched a few years back and they brought in a huge boom in content consumption through video on mobiles. And on the back of that, a huge digital economy has been created on which all these OTT live sports and many other platforms have been writing. So tell us, you talk about, yeah, go ahead. I'll just give an example on that one. I looked in preparation for spending some time with you today about what are people reading in India now versus before the pandemic. So what's changed, what's changed in the open web? So what's beautiful about the open web and journalism is that it's a great proxy for humans real curiosity. Like you will never tell Facebook what you really care about because you don't want people to know. Like you will never tell them about your anxiety about healthcare or about some personal passion of yours because you might not want to share. You will tell them about the things you want people to think or know that you like, right? But open web is different. You read about the things you really care about. So I thought that would be interesting to share with the audience. But specifically in India, as an example, I wrote it down. So food delivery, content around food delivery went up 70%. Online education went up 70%. Health care 65%. Finance 35%, which is interesting as people are planning their future and mortgages, financial services. So 35% increased versus before the pandemic over a long time. Gold went up 13%. Rainfall went up 76%. Maybe related to the rainfall. But if you're in the weather business, that's an opportunity. So all these categories are really opportunities for advertisers to jump in and be the first to convert consumers to try their service. Yeah, that's very interesting because like you said, social media platforms are vanity platforms where you want the world to see you in a certain manner. And when you're consuming content online, whether it's news, non-news, you're doing it instinctively. You're not really thinking about somebody tracking what you're doing. Tell us, Adam, a little bit more about when you say the pandemic will enhance the advertiser's ability to reach the consumer directly. And the digital world did that in many ways in the last few years. Advertisers were able to do that. But what do you think changes now? Of course, content consumption has changed. Trackability remains the same. So how does the advertiser has better tools to reach out to consumers directly now? Well, I don't know that the tools now changed versus eight months ago. I think they are changing fast with the use of AI. I think that we're seeing personalization taking a huge part in how consumers expect the world to be and how advertisers can reach consumers. So we don't want, we only have 24 hours a day. So that will, by the way, never change. So I think in terms of AI and the use of AI, Accenture predicts huge growth in India over the next few years, saying that by 2035, 50% of the country's gross value will be driven by AI. So I think whether that's in India or globally, that is a tool, if you will, that is changing the way advertisers are interacting with consumers, the right messages, meeting consumers earlier in the journey, not only with direct response ads, but earlier with content that they might like and try to personalize the experience for the consumer. So I do think that's a big change. The biggest change that happened in 2020, in my opinion, is on the human side, not on the technology side. I don't think technology has enhanced dramatically in six months, but what enhanced dramatically is how we behave as people and what we expect. So like I mentioned as an example, if I told you in February that billions of luxury masks will be sold, you would think that I'm crazy. If I told you that your kids will be spending eight hours a day on a screen talking to a teacher, you think that I'm crazy. If I told you that you will interact with your doctor most of the time, you'll take your medicine, your prescription, advice on your iPhone, you would think I'm crazy, but all of that happens right now. So I do think that the biggest change happened on our side, people, and actually technology is now catching up on us because we're already a step ahead and the biggest enabler to all of that from a technology or tool perspective, I do believe is AI. And it does work for brands and publishers and tech platforms to invest a lot. My concern on AI is the over reliance on AI. I speak about that quite often. When I look at as an example, even in 2020, global elections, people are home consuming media, how do you moderate for fake news? How do you moderate for hate content? How do you moderate for things that can hurt your kids and people that you love? So AI cannot do it solely. I really believe that it's a big mistake to let machines solve a problem that was created by people, fake news. So I think AI is the biggest enabler. It's not perfect. And that's the tool that advances us. And I think the biggest change happened on our side. I'm going to pick you up. That's very interesting. I'm going to come back to the AI and news moderation bit a little later. Let me now ask you on the other side. As I mentioned at the start, Kabula works with both the publishers as well as the brands. Since you also work with many brands, what have you seen from the brand side? How are these last eight, nine months impacted a brand's approach to utilizing digital as a platform? And I asked this for brands that are relatively lesser affected because of the pandemic. Of course, there were many categories, especially manufacturing, where sales just fell off the cliff for many months. But if you look at FMCG companies, you look at banking finance, these companies continue to do well. But have you seen a fundamental change in the way they've approached the digital platforms, either as advertising tools or as business enhancement tools? So I think I'll divide it to advertisers that existed before the pandemic. And within those, I think you've seen initially brand advertisers holding back on advertising just because they have less of a metric that can attach a brand advertising to an immediate conversion. And when business is slowing down or when you're in a pandemic in a financial crisis, performance advertising becomes more front in how you prioritize as a CMO or as a CEO or as a management team, you can't take the risk of thinking too long term when you now need to take care of the now. So I think we've seen brand advertisers pausing back in March and then rebounding heavily towards the end of the year. We've seen performance advertisers really, really doubling down. And the biggest thing that we've seen within that category is how they use data to know what to do. So everybody felt lost. It was such a new thing for all of us globally. Most of us have never experienced a global pandemic before. So when you're in that type of a fog, data can really be your compass to know what to do. So we've seen advertisers that use data to know what to advertise against more than before. Tabula, we specifically because of that thing that we saw advertisers do, we launched a website called trans.tabula.com which exposed all of our data for free. We said, why don't you know everything we know about what people are reading in the open web and advertise against it. And we saw interesting dynamics. We saw this food advertiser that stopped because they thought it's not a good time for them to do that. We showed them that it was 62% in the region where they actually delivered food. There was 62% of increase in readership of food delivery. So they unpaused the campaign, launched video campaign against it and drove growth to us. And it was a great case study of how data was more of a tool in the pandemic when you had no idea what to do. So I think we've seen that change. And the third one that I would mention is the birth of new businesses that would have taken us years to see or would have never been born. I don't think luxury masks that we're seeing now. I mean, I have 10 of them by car manufacturers and all the brands I love, I just buy, I buy so many of them because I need to use them. So I don't think that there are many categories like that. And those categories are new and relevant only because of the pandemic. Yeah, that's very interesting. Let me ask you about the challenges. We've all seen Google and Facebook have really dominated the advertising spends in the digital business for many years now. And publishers across the world have faced many challenges. Some publishers in Western countries have managed to at least break the subscription model to some extent, I would say. Indian publishers have had major challenges. So if you look at this year 2020, how would you define this year for publishers? And I ask this because you have a very good view of where publishers stand in terms of the traction they get on content. On one hand, content consumption is going up, people are spending more time on publisher platforms. Is Revenue ever going to catch up in a commensurate manner? What do publishers need to do? What can they do? Given that Google, Facebook, in the foreseeable future will continue to control the digital advertising market the way it is going? Well, Revenue I think is already coming back a lot of it. The second half of 2020 was a way stronger period than the first half and some territories, some verticals reports, even stronger than H2 of last year. So I think that from just overall programmatic dollars, performance dollars, revenue that came in in a more of an automatic way, we've seen a very strong rebound in the second half of the year. I think brand advertising is coming back and pending how you're using data to help those brand advertisers come back, you're seeing the rebound. So overall, I think that if some publishers share that they're having a great Q4, some not yet, but I suspect they will soon. So overall, on that front, I think things are coming back and that's great. The biggest opportunity publishers have now is one, like I said, users to some extent changed forever. We're now open to subscribe to things, to sign up to a newsletter, and to connect in ways we never did before. There's a reason why OTT is so successful. We love direct to consumer services. We're happy to pay for them. We're happy to pay for different subscription services being touched with someone. We need guidance, we feel alone, and some of that behavioral change is there forever. That is a huge opportunity, not necessarily to, I don't think subscription services and newsletters will replace advertising, but I think it's a very good way to connect. I think it's a very good way to diversify, and it's a very good way to know what your audience, your loyal readers want. So that is an opportunity for publishers that I think I really believe people should tap into. And from an advertising perspective, like I said, the biggest opportunity right now I think is to use data to know what to advertise against beyond what you think you know, because everything changed. So even if you think you know demographics, that you should use data to try to know what to go, the real, the challenge you have is that as a CMO, everybody's now overspending. So how do you find the right person that will discover your brand versus someone else's brand, you know? So I think that's, and I would say more meat term. So maybe not 2020, but a few years. I'm super optimistic about publishers. The reason is when I look at services like Apple News, that's a $2 trillion company, Apple, they're good. It's a good company. And they decided to integrate content in the most intimate way into their multi-billion dollar devices, which means Apple thinks content is important. And usually when you see a company that's as good as Apple make a decision like that, you should suspect there's a revolution coming in other areas. So I'm optimistic because I believe that we will see content getting integrated everywhere, in your car, in your fridge, in your audio devices. We're seeing it in devices. So I suspect we're going to read a lot and have text to audio a lot beyond your browser over the next two, three, four, five years. And I would suspect journalism, local news, national news will become the glue between me and all of the advice around me. So I bet journalism and I'm optimistic about it. And I think we're coming out of 2020 better than we definitely started 2020. Yeah, we all hope so. So this should mean a lot many more opportunities for Taboola, for a company like Apple is so focused on content. For you guys, this will open a whole new list of opportunities because that means more publishers. That means more content online, more page views and more opportunities for you to serve. Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, I think that Taboola's mission is exclusively focused on the open web, right? Google is for search, Facebook is for social, Amazon is for e-commerce, Taboola is for the rest of the world. And I think that the rest of the world matters a lot. We all need, you know, NDTV, India TV, India TV. We need those publishers to be very, very strong so we can get guidance that protects us from pharma, protects us from politicians, give us local guidance in the pandemic. We need that to survive and be strong. So I think that I'm optimistic about the existing open web and how it can grow. Like I mentioned, because I think the open web will be distributed in many other places. And for us as a company, I hope that we'll continue to make win-win type of decisions that are very aligned to the open web. Tell us, Adam, since you work with publishers across the world, let me come to specifically Indian publishers. Have you seen issues Indian publishers, vis-a-vis publishers in Western worlds? Are there any difference in terms of how they approach business and issues they face? Of course, money, revenue, monetization is an issue for everyone, right? But if you go down to a nuanced level, how do you see them working differently vis-a-vis some of the counterparts in the Western world? It's a very good question because people tend to think that the web is the web is the web, but it's not always true. And there's something very special that companies can learn from the Indian market, user behavior and how they consume content. So as an example, first of all, it's a huge market. So you have over a billion people that consume content in the open web in India. So you have a lot of scale, which is very different than most other places in the world. It's a huge market. It's $8 billion in media spent a year. So it's a market worth pursuing in India. And the digital portion of it is growing 33% into next year. So overall, it's a lot of people and a big market. So let's start with the top. And then more specifically, to me, what's very unique about the market and what companies like to learn is probably the mobile element of it. So if you subscribe to a future that is not mostly mobile, but maybe only mobile, India is probably the best place in the world to learn about the future. So you're seeing a lot more consumers meeting the internet for the first time via a small device, spending most of their time on a small device. And that is probably a proxy for what the rest of the world will look like in a few years. So I think that's something that from an advertiser perspective and a publisher perspective is very different than an enterprise publisher in the US or in the UK or in Australia. So I think from an advertiser perspective in mobile, conversion to performance advertisers in mobile, brand messages, big impact placements, ad formats that are great in mobile, all those things are a few steps ahead in India. And that makes companies like us think harder about how to make that market successful. And when you sit down and have conversations with Indian publishers, what are the three, four takeaways that we choose that they need Tabula to nail down? You know, it's a lot of times about the editorial team. How can we support the workflows, the people that write how we can be part of growing that team from a monetization perspective, how we can optimize revenue with the purpose of growing the editorial team. So a lot of our conversations are focused on editorial workflows. We have a product called newsroom, which is a product that is tailored just to the work, the editorial staff. So as an example, if you're a publisher in India, how can you learn about what your readers read on other sites and in India in the open web? How can you learn which pieces of content convert to subscription? So you can write more about it so you can spark that curiosity for your consumers. So I would say a lot of my conversations with publishers in India and some of my best best friends, Suparna from NDTV and others are from that from the market. A lot of times it's amazing how editorial first publishers in India are more than other markets, which is very special to me. They're really working from their heart. And that means that a lot of their decision and conversation with us is around the people on the ground that actually create the content we all need to consume. Interesting, yes. Let me come to, you know, since we've been talking about digital advertising, let me come to another aspect of digital advertising. I recently had a head for Guru Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay's view was that in the next few years in India, digital advertising growth will be driven by small businesses. It's happening world over these large, you know, world internet companies. If I look at what Tabula has done so far, your primary forte has been bringing brands and publishers together, right, and serving the consumer. What I see is the brands that you largely work with are, you know, the big ones, the, you know, the marquee ones with a lot of money to spend. How does Tabula now curate the next, you know, 10,000 or 100,000 set of advertisers, the small guys, the guy who has, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 to spend and then create a long tail of advertising because that's where growth, especially in countries like India is going to come from. How do you get relevance for that? Yeah, so there are two types of smaller businesses and even long tail over time on the advertiser side and on the publisher side. On the advertiser side, we launched a self-service a few years back to allow basically anyone to go to Tabula website, start a campaign at a very small budget and use the same capabilities that a big brand can use and get going and be discovered in the open web. And that business has grown quite significantly. So it's already over $100 million business for us, which we've announced when that happened. And what's interesting is that a lot of times those advertisers are the best advertisers. You know, it's small businesses, it's entrepreneurs, founders that have a product and, you know, new headphones or different cool services. And then by the way, many of them mature into our enterprise service where they have an account manager and because they become so big, they need a lot of attention. So we do have that for smaller businesses on the advertiser side. On the publisher side, we're not there yet. And I'm not sure that would be a short term initiative to, you know, to launch blogs and smaller sites. That takes a different type of technology and processes that we don't yet have. With an advertiser side, I'm very excited about smaller businesses and self-service in general. And funny enough, since we launched it thinking it will be mainly for smaller businesses, I can tell you some of our biggest advertisers prefer to use the self-service versus talking to people. So you just see, what's interesting is when you put yourself out there, you discover how people want to use your product in ways you didn't think they would, which is great, you know, because that's a good way to, it keeps you humble and makes you better. So it is live. It's used by smaller businesses, but also some of our biggest advertisers use it. Fantastic. Let me come to a very, you know, the most, the fastest growing area in, you know, digital at least as far as India is concerned, video, right? Video has seen huge boom in the last few years. As I mentioned earlier, the India's largest telecom provider with their, you know, almost pre-data plans was instrumental in this boom. Today's sports content, IPL, which is the Premier League, which is India's largest sport sporting event is consumed billions of minutes every season. Tabula is a company that started, I won't say in the pre-video era, but, you know, six, seven, eight years back when video was not that big. You think, you know, you've been a little late in catching up on the video thing, because what I see is largely, you know, text-driven work that Tabula is doing. So, but funny enough, I started Tabula as a video recommendation company, just so you know, because I couldn't find anything to watch on TV. And so actually the first few years of Tabula were just video recommendation service with no advertising business. So funny enough, we're closing a circle on that. Video is not insignificant part of our business now. We've acquired a company in 2016 called Convert Media, which basically what we had a feed product integrated across the web. And we followed some of Instagram evolution from the product perspective and how they integrated feed video in the feed. And we thought that's a really engaging way to surface videos to consumers. We figured there's going to be the YouTubes of the world when you go to a video website to watch a video. And then there's the rest of the world where you stumble upon video. Right? It's not so much of a video website, but video is part of the experience. And we, as we analyzed that, we thought that video in feed could be bigger than YouTube. Right? So if you think of all the impressions in the world outside of YouTube collectively, when we read, if video was part of that, video would be huge for everyone. So the question is how we can do it in a way that's relevant, personalized, engaging, and good for advertisers and publishers alike with users in the middle. So that's, first of all, that's our go-to-market strategy. We've acquired a company called Convert Media to execute on that vision and basically integrate video into our feed. That has grown significantly for us and helped our publishers generate a lot of revenue. Brands really like it. It's very visible. Viewability is great. Completion rates are great. And in general, I think that as TV is moving to digital and as publishers are looking to grow revenue, video will be one of the best ways to do it. But it's not going to be how we used to do it. Publishers used to move a user from an article page to a video page. Publishers used to have a small YouTube section on their site. And it's very difficult to convert a reader to a video experience like that. But I think if you do the opposite and bring the video section into the article experience and make it infinite like Instagram, like TikTok, you'll find that the consumer is really engaged with it. And that's a great opportunity for publishers to become YouTube websites. So my belief is that the future is an open web that looks like Instagram with video part of it. Yeah, I think video will be a very, very large instrumental part of what brands are going to do on the web and also where the consumer consumption trends are headed. Everybody is, like you mentioned, Adam, everybody is caught on to content today. Content is the game in town when it comes to publishers trying to get traction, whether it is text content, video content, or brands using content to reach out to those consumers via these publisher websites. What that has led to is two things. One, among us amounts of fragmentation because everybody is doing the same thing. And they are all doing it at the same time and they are doing it multiple times over. So if you had to tell a brand, a CMO, three, four key important things to follow when you are creating a content-led strategy to be on publisher platforms, what would those things be in today's world, a post-COVID world? I think I mentioned data. I don't believe everything is the same. There is a huge signal that happens when someone is behaving in certain ways. So I think data is a good guide to break your beliefs about what you think you know. So you should always have your demographic packages and go enough to the market to think you are going. But then let data enable you to make mistakes and open up. So I think my first advice would be to make mistakes using data. Explore yourself. That's the first one. The second one is to don't do the obvious. It's much easier to work with the top 20% of the market, the top 30% of the market, to work with Google and Facebook. So I think diversity really matters in terms of... How many CMOs do you find who are willing to take their risk? I think CMOs really want to take their risk, but a lot of times they're very busy and the people that execute the campaigns are not them. So those who execute any campaigns, they don't necessarily have the appetite to learn how to work with a different publisher, to work with a different platform. So I do think CMOs have an overall strategy to diversify their campaigns and not be relying on any one channel. But a lot of times these are huge organizations with thousands of media buyers that have funded harder to actually execute on that. But I think that's important because the last thing we want is Google and Facebook having every all of our budgets controlling prices, controlling product innovation, controlling our success, owning our future. So that is just a very bad future. So we it's important to do that. So I think data to make mistakes, diversity in terms of your channel spend, I think that's important. By the way, I think also for more of a humanity perspective, if I was a CMO, I would also look at just DEI as a topic and just diversity in general and try to think how as a CMO I can make an impact on the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, I see some agencies in CMOs talking to me about it. I think it's amazing. So as a CMO, you have an opportunity to dictate and decide where things are going. So that means I spoke about diversity from a budget perspective, but that you can also make an impact on humanity by supporting small businesses that are owned by diverse communities, by supporting different businesses that if they succeed, it will enable more diversity. So I think money is not money all the time. There's different ways of spending it and using it. And I really think all of us as leaders, CMOs, head of publishers, head of advertisers, people like you that talk to the world, we have an opportunity to especially after 2020 to think differently about the future. And I believe by the way it will drive business growth. Like I don't think you're doing this because you're just holistic. I think you're doing it because it's the right thing to do and it will do good for business as well. So I think I spoke about data, I spoke about diversity of channels, I spoke about impact and beyond gross margin and business and things like that. And that's why I would strongly encourage people to make DEI a topic for them to discuss. And Leslie, I would try to, if I was a CMO, I would measure how many people do I have their email or their phone or a way to connect with them directly, not through anyone. How many people can I talk to directly? I think that is the biggest user behavioral change of 2020. And if you think we're going back to nobody wants to sign in future, you're living in the past. That's right. I think that's a well-made point, Adam. You mentioned about Apple reading content for their devices. And as we've seen, Facebook has been going after Apple in the past few days. What's your view on that? And does that also impact the digital publishing environment? Because if data availability is going to be restricted by companies like Apple, then it does impact the digital publishing and digital advertising business. Well, Apple has already impacted the open web by blocking third-party cookies a few years ago. That's right. So I think what we're seeing right now is a different type of giants talking to each other with us little people in the middle. And then, but right now what you're seeing is more of a native app privacy discussion, which obviously affects Facebook more because most of their business is in an app environment. So I think the current dynamics are less relevant for the majority of the open web journalism, because most of the journalism traffic is still either mobile web, amp, tablet, or desktop. So when it's mobile, for publishers, a lot of time it's not necessarily the app. App is a good business, but a lot of time the mobile web version and the amp will supersede by a lot the app traffic. Some publishers it's different for them, but I would say categorically it's not. So I think that the Facebook Apple discussions right now are less relevant because they're mainly tailored around the native app and in that world we're less reliant on that as publishers. Saying that, you know, the dynamics around privacy are very important. You know, we all want a better private future for consumers because I'm not sure my mom understands when she goes on a website who tracks her and what follows her and all those things. So I really want the web to be safe. Saying that, I think we need mechanisms for advertisers to succeed in the open web. So I think Google is doing a good job leading discussions on replacing cookies with a different mechanism and I trust they'll do the right thing. So I do think it's the right approach and attitude. We do want a better private future than the craziness that we've seen in the last 20 years. Saying that, I do think we want to eliminate the opportunity to personalize and make the web relevant. So that's going to take two years or three years to evolve. Nevertheless, I think the Apple Facebook thing doesn't really affect publishers necessarily as much. Tell me the cookie-less future does impact publishers and by virtue of that, it also impacts companies like Tabula. What's your take on that? How do you get around that? How do you prepare for a cookie-less future? Because that's not going to happen. All the tracking mechanisms you've created in the last few years, they kind of become redundant. No, that's not really because I'll tell you, first of all, it might be completely the opposite. So first of all, Safari's been around with third-party cookies been blocked for a while. So we're already already again in the future looking back at a cookie-less world in many ways. So I think we shouldn't expect and Safari, by the way, has a lot of market share globally. Some countries less, but in a heavy Android market. But overall, Safari and Apple, they have good market share. So I think we've already seen some of it. And the second thing is that do I think programmatic companies that rely on retargeting and things like that are impacted? Yes, because it's much harder to retarget and do things of that nature in a cookie-less world. Companies like Tabula and publishers, by the way, that have a very strong signal for what you currently read. I don't think that this is going to be a huge problem for them because there's something very, very important that advertisers need side by side to an article. So when you read about on a technology section of a news website or an automobile website, when you read about something like that, I'm telling you your signal for curiosity and being in that market is a lot more than you told Facebook you like cars. Okay, because you're now reading about it. So I think that even in a cookie-less world, one, the signal of the open web is very strong. Two, I don't think cookies are going to die and will be with nothing. I think cookies will be replaced with a safer, better mechanism and the analogy I'll make is when Flash, if you remember Apple killed Flash, I don't know, 10 years ago, it was replaced with HTML5. HTML5 gave us the capabilities of we used to enjoy with Flash online, but much safer, much lighter. So I think that's what I think is going to happen. Clear point. Let me come to the recent big news about your merger call-off with Outfrain. I'll spend a limited time on that, but tell us why you were doing the merger and does that set you back and how do you kind of continue with your growth plans despite the merger not happening? I mean, I think, first of all, it was a very engaging and intense experience for everyone. Both companies did it, got into that engagement because we wanted to do it and we wanted to succeed. I think we didn't anticipate it will take longer than we thought and the pandemic will happen. So things happened that we didn't anticipate when we got into that, but for the most part, I can just tell you we met amazing people. Many of them will stay friends with, I mean, this is not personal. If anything, we met great people that we were impressed by and we learned from each other as what's our aspiration about the open web and things of that nature. So it was a very good experience on that front. I think we didn't anticipate the pandemic, we didn't anticipate it will take so much longer and at the end, it didn't work for both of us, but not for any reason, but the fact that we thought we had a better future independently. So I think this was, both companies made a decision together to move on and removed on, but I'm sure they'll be okay and to bully is in a very strong place to invest in the future from a product perspective and to keep expanding in all directions I mentioned. So I could not be more optimistic and bullish about the future than I am now and I wish my friends an outbreak with luck. Thanks, Adam. Let me come to a video because as we as we discussed, video is the future of content consumption online and video is there in many parts. Do you see content publishers once slow in catching up on video because truth is that if you leave out native television content producers, the other publishers are not really, they don't have video in their DNA, right? Whereas the consumer is looking inherently, instinctively for video content today. So what do you think is the way for content publishers to catch up on video content curation because that's where the world is headed? And how does the vula kind of play that game because you know that's as we discussed in the future? Yeah, I think it's a wrong assumption to think that users are looking for video. I don't think that's the case at all. Think they look for video when they open Netflix, they look for videos maybe when they go to a broadcaster like NDTV. But those are very specific situations when the brand is a video brand. It was born to be video, it is video, the video, it's a video brand. For the rest, I don't think we should assume users look for videos. I don't think we should assume we can convert them to look for videos. We should do exactly the opposite. We should bring videos to them. So I strongly think that if let's take a simple example, let's say you're an automobile blog. You have no video production, you don't have a video section. You can do one in two things or two things. You can create a video tab so people go and watch videos on your site which is your YouTube on your site. There's a video section. People would go and then you create videos or you embed videos from YouTube or you syndicate or all those things. Or the other way around you can bring videos into the articles themselves. So I read about Toyota and in the article I have a feed with videos that are relevant for the article. I strongly believe the second option is what is going to be the video growth for the open web because I don't think people are aware that I'm supposed, I don't think users are aware that we're supposed to have a video section unless the brand is a video brand from the moment it was born like YouTube, Netflix or NDTV or CNN or NBC News. I don't think we should expect users to change behavior. So we have to bring videos to them. But you have every publisher, especially I'm talking about news publishers, everybody is changing videos. Even the non-television native companies, everybody is going doubling down on video. So do you think they are getting it wrong? No, I mean I think again, if you're a native video company, I'm saying non-native video companies. Yeah, if you're not a native video company and you're doubling down on video the question is how do you surface that video through your consumer. If you're doubling down on video and you're putting all those videos in a video section, I think you're going to fail. It will be uniquely hard to convert readers to video watchers. If you're doubling down on video and you're putting those videos where users already spend their time, you're going to be massively successful. And that is, by the way, that is the Instagram Facebook case study. Instagram had two options. Launch a video tab or bring videos into the feed. And what did they do to fight YouTube? They did not launch a YouTube. They brought YouTube into the feed. So again, I don't think Instagram made the wrong decision. People were already scrolling on the feed. The way to fight YouTube for Facebook was to bring YouTube into the feed, not to launch a YouTube section. So I believe doubling down on video is the best thing you can do, whether it's creation, syndication, aggregation. But I think it's mainly about the user experience and how you do it, if that makes sense. And as we know, Instagram has now done both. They've also launched Reels within the app. So you also have videos within the feed and you have a separate tab also. So they've done both in a way. So let me come to another topic you touched upon, which is fake news. And content seeding has also led to this huge industry that is spawned where you are putting out content, which is coming from unknown, unreliable sources. And social media platforms obviously have been accused of allowing fake news to get populated on their massive platforms. And nobody really has been able to put down a meaningful solution. Like you mentioned at the start, AI is not a solution. AI can't solve a human created problem. Because at least as of today, human brain is far ahead of whatever we've created in the computers. So if you were to look at the interim term, 12, 24 months, do you think the problem of fake news is going to go up multiple times over? I mean, I think we're much more aware of this topic than we used to. So I don't suspect it will. The trend is negative. I think that in 2020, we spoke about, especially around the elections and all of that, but we spoke about fake news and the importance of content moderation by an order of magnitude more than we did in the past. So I actually think we're doing the right thing. We're talking about it. You're talking about it. CNBC is talking about it. Bloomberg is talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. So I think we're seeing the right trend of bringing it up to an awareness. A few things. One, I don't think if it's an unknown, you mentioned unknown brain, it's necessarily bad. In fact, I think we should not allow ourselves to think that. What's great about the open web is the opportunity for anyone to share their voice and to be discovered by people. So we shouldn't be in a future that only the New York Times survives. Right? We don't want that. New York Times is great. We need more. We want opinion. We want diversity. We want to give a chance to smaller businesses and so forth. So I don't think unknown is the problem. I think problems are the problems. If you are doing something bad, that's bad. So then the question is, how do you moderate? What do you do? What resources do you put in place to make sure that the web is safe? So my opinion is that AI can help you, but you have to start a team of humans, people, that actually are engaged church and state. Nobody can talk to them. There is a public policy. Say what you think is wrong. Put it out there. If you're a platform, if you're a publisher, if you're whoever you are that interacts with consumers, say this is wrong, that's what I don't want to do and give people a chance to react to your policy and start a team of people that will moderate it. We now have more at Tabula, more than 50 people that moderate over a million URLs a month, reading pages. And we have a huge R&D in Israel and LA. So it's not about AI deficiencies. We have a lot of it. It's just not good enough. It will never be good enough to moderate new things. There was this case on TikTok that there was a tag on TikTok that kids uploaded videos and they said eating pasta for dinner. And it sounds perfectly fine, but what people realized after a while is that when kids uploaded videos with eating pasta for dinner, I read about it. Obviously, I didn't know about it. Otherwise, it was a sign of kids that were considering committing suicide. AI would never know that eating pasta for dinner means shouting out for help. And a continuation team picked it up and parents picked it up. So I think that the solution has to involve humans alongside AI. If I was Facebook, I would hire 50,000 people to do it and moderate everything all the time against the policy, not to block the unknown, not to block free speech, but to block every fake news, hate, and things that should not be out there anywhere. That's yeah, I think I think one of the key things is for companies to put adequate resources to do it. That's the starting step. And then is the next step of being able to moderate it, not black it out, but there are gray areas there also, right? I mean, there is something which is obviously fake news. And the other part, which is more, you know, gray area where there is different differing opinions. So at least the first part can be tackled very easily, which is clearly fake news. The second part can be taken on later. But I think the first thing that is required is for adequate resources to be put into moderate this content. We have just two, three minutes left, Adam. So before we go, I want to talk about Tabula's plan, plans now that the merger has been called off. Are you planning to do an IPO? Are you planning a fundraise? How does Tabula grow from here? How do the next three years look like? Yeah, I mean, there's nothing I can share in terms of specific plans. But in general, Tabula is in a very good place. I'm very fortunate for our people's health, our partners, you know, sticking strong and weathering the storm together. So I feel very lucky. You know, my dad is a musician. He hasn't played on stage for almost a year. So you see just very different ways people receive the pandemic. So overall, I'm very lucky. And I feel, you know, gifted to be here today and talk to you and about the future and all those things. Specifically, you know, we're looking to the future. There are two areas we're going to look at. The first one is, you know, how we can recommend more type of things such as, you know, e-commerce and more video and some of the things we talked about today. And that will make our yield better and experience for consumers better. And the second thing as a growth opportunity is how we can expand beyond the browser and bring our publisher news into anywhere people spend their time. So, you know, I think test floods should be solved with Tabula inside of them, you know, and surfacing news by all these great publishers from India. So I'm shocked Tesla is not sold with Tabula inside of it. But, you know, hopefully one day. So my point is that anything that I'm interacting with should have Tabula inside and surfacing me, you know, in distant time and in the TV and all the publishers I learn. So the second area of growth for us is Tabula everywhere. And bringing those relevant premium quality personalized news anywhere I may spend my time on. So those two things will take us to the next five, 10 years. You know, you mentioned we're over a billion dollars in gross revenue company. We're profitable. We're growing fast. It's over 60 billion dollar advertising market globally in the open web. And I think the open web needs someone that is exclusively passionate about just open web, not the platform with an identity crisis, not, you know, someone that just cares open web. And that's that's who we are. If I may add lesser controversy. Thank you so much, Adam, for joining us on an early Friday morning there. It's almost nighttime here. The sun is already set in Mumbai. We wish you luck. And as I mentioned at the start, Tabula is a company which is God sent for publishers, especially in India, where revenues, especially in a COVID world, are not easy to come by. And a large share is taken away by what we call these wall gardens. So most Indian publishers will wish that you bring in more revenue to them. And they continue to create more traction. They continue to create more user engagement. Thank you. And it was a very enjoyable session. I hope people who joined in liked it will be happy to send you any questions that come post the session. I'm told we have limited time since you have another session. Good luck to you and thank you for joining us. Stay well. Thank you everyone. Thank you.