2. Outbrain is a leader in text content discovery (as in ‘Other articles that may interest
you’, see next slide).
Taboola does the same for Video content discovery.
Synergies:
- Sales, Support and Marketing: many of the leading content sites – think
CNN, Techcrunch, Huffington Post etc – already provide both text and video content.
Taboola and Outbrain probably have a nearly complete overlap in their customer
profiles, and could cross-sell easily. See below for some prominent customers of
each.
- IP: Taboola has content discovery patents, eg. US 2010/0293048 (US 2011/0282745
is limited to video content), which could
- Development: their work is very similar.
- Admin: obviously. Two Israeli startups, can drastically cut overhead.
- Most importantly, they’d create the dominant player across all content discovery.
This creates an optimal market position; they can expect to quickly b branded as the
go-to place for content discovery.
Structure: Outbrain has a hug cash ‘war chest’, raised $35M they didn’t need in Dec
2011. They should use some cash, for departing employees’ options, and the rest in
stock of Outbrain, to build a bigger, better, more valuable Outbrain-Taboola.