Building the Next Era of the Open Web with Adam Singolda

10 snips

Dec 5, 2025

Adam Singolda, Founder and CEO of Taboola, shares insights on the rapid evolution of digital media. He discusses how AI is reshaping audience discovery and publisher strategies. Singolda highlights the launch of USA Today’s Deeper Dive, its impact on news consumption, and the necessity for publishers to embrace chat-based interfaces. He emphasizes the importance of building trust with audiences and experimenting with AI to stay competitive. With unique perspectives from the forefront of advertising, he outlines the challenges and opportunities for media in the open web era.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Performance Engine For The Open Web

Taboola positions itself as the performance advertising engine for the open web outside Google and Meta.
The company partners with publishers and only wins when those publishers succeed.

INSIGHT

AI: Better Matchmaking, Less Search Traffic

AI improved Taboola's core matchmaking between content, users, and advertisers via machine learning and LLMs.
AI also reduced search traffic as users get answers without visiting publisher sites.

ANECDOTE

Deeper Dive Adoption Breakthrough

Early Deeper Dive adoption was low because users treated it like site search.
Adding personalized suggested questions unlocked user engagement and habit formation.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

The Taboola CEO explains how USA Today’s DeeperDive changes news discovery, and why publishers might need “chat” after all.

AI is rewriting the rules of digital media and few people have had a closer view of the shift than Adam Singolda. In this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal has a candid conversation with the Taboola founder about where the open web is headed and why the next era of audience discovery may look nothing like the search driven world we grew up in.

Adam has been building Taboola since 2007 and continues to shape one of the largest advertising and recommendation platforms on the open web. He shares what publishers often miss about AI, how performance advertising is evolving, and why trusted media brands may hold more power than ever as chat based discovery becomes mainstream.

Why This Matters

Media is in a moment of rapid transition. Search traffic is shifting, conversational queries are becoming a default behavior, and publishers are being pushed to rethink how they attract and retain audiences. Adam offers rare insight from inside a global platform that sits at the center of these changes. He explains how AI is reshaping revenue models, what publishers can do right now to stay competitive, and why this new interaction layer may redefine how journalism is discovered and consumed.

What We Cover

• Adam’s journey from founding Taboola in 2007 to running a global advertising and recommendation platform
• How Taboola positions itself as the performance engine of the open web
• What the company has learned about audience behavior across thousands of publishers
• How AI is changing advertising performance, engagement, and publisher economics
• The impact of declining search traffic and the rise of chat based discovery
• The creation of Taboola’s Deeper Dive experience and how users actually interact with AI on news sites
• Why publishers need to experiment with AI quickly or risk losing ground
• How trust and brand identity give premium publishers an advantage in the AI era
• What adoption looks like when you introduce AI directly into media workflows
• The future of LLM monetization and why Adam sees a major opportunity for journalism

More…

Learn about Taboola’s mission, how it started — https://www.taboola.com. Taboola.com+1

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamsingolda

📩 Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to The Media Copilot on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. On YouTube? Tap the Like button and Subscribe to the channel.

For more AI tools and resources built for media professionals, visit MediaCopilot.ai.

Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0