Inside the Merger That Rewired the Open Internet

For nearly a decade, two companies, one a native content recommendation engine and the other a premium outstream video pioneer, each fought for survival in a space increasingly captured by Google and Meta. 

Neither had the scale to win alone. So they merged to create something neither could be on their own: a credible, cookieless, publisher-first alternative to the walled garden duopoly.

Monthly users reachable through the combined Teads platform across 10,000+ premium publisher environments globally. 

Here’s what you’ll learn: 

Somewhere around 2021, the math stopped working for independent adtech. Google and Meta collectively controlled just over 50% of worldwide digital advertising revenue, effectively forcing the rest of the ecosystem (publishers, independent platforms, agencies) to compete over the scraps. For companies like Outbrain and Teads, which had each built meaningful but subscale businesses on the open internet, they had become too big to be irrelevant, but too small to matter at the infrastructure level. 

Outbrain's predicament was visible in its own IPO. When it listed on the Nasdaq, it raised just $160 million at a $1.12 billion valuation far below the $2 billion it had sought earlier in the year, and a sign that the market saw limited headroom for a "chumbox" content recommendation company competing in a cookie-dependent ecosystem. Shares subsequently fell nearly 80% from their IPO price, and the company also had its two largest customers each accounting for roughly 10% of revenue, wit its core native ad format widely perceived as low-quality inventory.

Teads, meanwhile, faced a parallel ceiling from the other direction. The French outstream video pioneer had grown into a premium publisher network reaching more than 75% of the Comscore top 300 editorial publishers globally and pioneered in-article video formats that commanded higher CPMs and better brand safety. But its business was branded-heavy and upper-funnel, so it lacked the performance advertising plumbing and mid-market advertiser relationships that generate consistent recurring revenue. A 2021 plan to spin Teads out via IPO at a targeted $5 billion valuation fell through, leaving it trapped inside Altice as the telecom parent scrambled to pay down debt.

The broader industry dynamics were accelerating the pressure. The number of adtech deals nearly doubled in H1 2024 versus H1 2023, driven by three converging forces: economic pressure on venture-backed adtech players unable to reach profitability, rising compliance costs from GDPR and CCPA, and the looming end of third-party cookies that threatened to vaporize the tracking infrastructure most independent platforms depended on. 

For open-internet players, this was an existential infrastructure war, and individual scale was the only real weapon. Without merging, both Outbrain and Teads risked being eroded into irrelevance.

The hidden team behind unicorn growth for Suno, Jeeves, and Picsart.

We’ve hired agencies. Most were bad. So we built one for founders like us.

Free growth plan for Profit Snack readers. We’ll show you the levers to scale fast in your niche over 6 months.

The Outbrain–Teads deal described by Outbrain CEO David Kostman as building "an end-to-end full-funnel platform for the open internet," was structured as an acquisition but in reality, was built as a merger of equals. 

Outbrain agreed to pay a total consideration of approximately $900 million, comprising $625 million in upfront cash financed through Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Mizuho, plus 43.75 million Outbrain shares with Altice retaining a roughly 40% stake and two board seats in the combined entity. The deal closed on February 3, 2025, and the merged company immediately rebranded entirely under the Teads name, with Kostman serving as CEO.

Outbrain contributed its AI prediction engine, performance advertising capabilities, and a decade's worth of proprietary behavioral data, the so-called "Interest Graph" built from billions of content engagements across its publisher network. They had spent years building cookieless targeting tools ahead of the third-party cookie deprecation deadline, including contextual and interest-based targeting that the company claimed drove up to 55% higher conversion rates than standard cookie-based approaches. Its Engagement Bid Strategy (EBS) product, launched as a cookieless optimization tool, required no tracking pixel installation and instead leveraged first-party behavioral signals directly from the publisher network. These were precisely the capabilities that brand-heavy Teads lacked.

Teads brought the other half of the equation: an elite publisher infrastructure and premium video formats. Pre-merger Teads ran campaigns for roughly 70% of the world's largest advertisers and had already moved into Connected TV, including deals with LG and Hisense to sell advertising on their smart TV home screens, an emerging high-CPM surface that Outbrain had no presence in. 

Teads' InRead video format, embedded within editorial content rather than interrupting it, had established a premium positioning that stood in sharp contrast to Outbrain's "chumbox" reputation. Combining Outbrain's mid-to-lower funnel performance engine with Teads' branding and awareness capabilities theoretically created a full-funnel platform spanning awareness through purchase, across web, mobile, and CTV.

This integration targeted three forms of synergy within both companies. First, cross-selling: Outbrain's large SME and direct-response advertiser base could now access Teads' premium video inventory, while Teads' enterprise brand clients could activate Outbrain's performance tools. Second, infrastructure consolidation: the companies expected to eliminate approximately 200 overlapping roles, primarily in markets where both had operated parallel sales and technical teams. Third, data leverage: unifying two of the open internet's largest first-party publisher data sets gave the combined platform a cookieless targeting asset that competitors would find difficult to replicate without similar direct publisher relationships at scale. 

Revised synergy targets were upgraded to $65–75 million in annual savings by fiscal year 2026, up from the original $50–60 million guidance, a sign that the integration was proving out faster than expected. The merged company also entered the market at a structurally opportune moment: just months after closing, a federal court would hand independent adtech players the most significant potential tailwind in years.

The two companies reported a combined Ex-TAC Gross Profit of approximately $623 million and Adjusted EBITDA of approximately $230 million for 2024, a combined profitability metric that would have been inconceivable for either business operating independently. 

Revenue for legacy Teads alone hit $386.6 million in 2024 with Adjusted EBITDA of $122.7 million, while Outbrain contributed $236.1 million in revenue. The merged entity's scale places it as the third-largest open web adtech player by revenue, behind only The Trade Desk and Criteo.

The new Teads is directly partnered with more than 10,000 publishers and 20,000 advertisers globally, operating with a team of nearly 1,800 people in 36 countries. That matters especially in the context of cookieless targeting: because Teads has direct code-on-page relationships with its publisher partners rather than indirect programmatic connections, it can collect and activate consented first-party data signals at a scale that contextual-only platforms cannot match. The merged platform's CTV business, fueled by Teads' smart TV home screen deals, adds a high-CPM surface area that buffers against ongoing pressure on traditional web display inventory. CTV and programmatic video collectively surpassed $134.8 billion in U.S. ad spend in 2024, up 18% year-over-year, with no sign of deceleration.

There was more drama just weeks after the merger. A federal judge ruled that Google had "willfully acquired and maintained monopoly power" in the advertising technology market, specifically finding that Google had illegally tied its publisher ad server (DFP) to its ad exchange (AdX), forcing publishers to adopt both or lose access to premium demand. 

The ruling, the second major antitrust loss for Google in under a year, opened the door to potential structural remedies, including the forced divestiture of Google Ad Manager. For a publisher-first platform that had spent years building relationships precisely because publishers sought alternatives to Google's infrastructure, the timing was striking. Whatever the eventual remedy, the ruling validated the thesis that the open internet needed a scaled, independent alternative to Google's vertical stack, the exact gap the new Teads was designed to fill.

The merged company has also launched new products designed to convert its combined data assets into advertiser performance. 

The Moments product, Outbrain's context-detection engine, uses real-time signals about what a user is reading to serve relevant ads in the instant of highest receptivity, without any persistent tracking. Connected Ads, the new Teads format, creates sequential branding opportunities across two placements on the same publisher page. And the shared first-party data stack gives advertisers access to a platform that processed $1.4 billion in advertising spend across 10,000 media partners in 2025, with Ex-TAC Gross Profit growing 124% year-over-year to $530 million as the integration scaled. 

Two companies that had each spent years losing ground to the walled gardens had, by consolidating their complementary assets, built something neither could have been on their own. 

Key takeaways to consider…

The Hustle shows you what's actually interesting. Every morning, we send 1.5M readers the business stories mainstream media would never touch: AI chatbots monitoring Burger King workers' friendliness, smartphones with robot arms that sing lullabies to babies, and Finnish companies selling $120K snow blankets to ski resorts. These aren't just entertaining (though they absolutely are). They're insights into how business actually evolves. Delivered in 5 minutes, with zero jargon.

Think beyond the obvious. Subscribe to the Hustle daily for free.

$900 million - Outbrain acquisition price of Teads 

$230 million - Combined adjusted EBITDA in 2024 

$530 million - Combined Ex-TAC gross profit in 2025

$1.4 billion - Advertising spend processed through the platform in 2025

10,000+ - Premium publisher partners integrated post-merger

55% - Higher conversion rates using Outbrain Interest Graph

$65–75 million - Annual synergies targeted by FY2026

Your Prospects Aren’t Choosing The Best Option. They’re Choosing The One They Trust Most. The difference is rarely the work, but the signal. Publishing a book does something a pitch deck can’t. It answers the questions your ideal customers have before they ever get on a call and removes doubt before you walk into the room. If you’re ready to build trust and authority, this free starter kit has everything you need.

Selling a business you've built over decades is personal. The wrong buyer can unravel what took years to earn. Highmark Ledger believes there's a better way for owners to exit or just start to take chips off the table. Refer a company and get up to $10K if a deal closes.

Starting as a teenager shining shoes and fixing cars, Dennis Washington learned equipment, crews, and costs from the ground up, then used that knowledge to spot undervalued, capital‑intensive assets; reopening mines, leasing railroads, rebuilding marine networks, and applying the same disciplined playbook again and again until his industrial holdings were worth billions.

Using Anthropic’s quiet decision to withhold its powerful Claude Mythos model, this article shows how a single San Francisco company now makes de facto choices about global cyber risk, and asks why software that runs hospitals and power grids isn’t governed with the same rigor as cars, drugs, or buildings.

Bootstrapping is tough. 62% of self-funded companies run out of cash before reaching profitability. But what if you could get the battle-tested tactics from founders who’ve built profitable businesses? This comprehensive guide equips you with practical templates for managing cash flow, prioritizing investments, and driving revenue from day one.