Taboola, which serves up catchy clickbait links on websites, bet until four months ago that its future lay in merging with its chief rival. Now the company is opting for a different route: going public via Wall Street’s hottest trend. Taboola is set to announce on Monday that it will merge with a so-called special-purpose acquisition company, a kind of publicly traded deal vehicle that has exploded in popularity. And it will help Taboola in what its chief executive, Adam Singolda, says is its mission: become a counterweight to digital ad giants like Google and Facebook. “We will have currency and access to cash to expand into new areas,” he said in an interview, adding that the current online ads landscape is “a huge market that’s fragmented.”

Source: New York Times January 25, 2021 11:45 UTC