Adam Singolda

Taboola is merging with ION Acquisition Corp, which raised $259 million in an IPO last October. The deal will value Taboola at $2.6 billion, it said.

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of advertising. Taboola and Outbrain, rivals that both operate advertising-based content recommendation engines for publishers -- which typically appear in the form of boxes at the bottom of articles online that feature a mix of stories from the publications themselves, plus ads and sponsored content from other sites [...]