Taboola Statistics 2026: 30 Numbers From 206,000 Live Ads

Taboola is the second-largest native advertising network by live creative volume in OpenAdLibrary's independent index: 206,145 live Taboola creatives as of June 2026, out of 725,882 creatives tracked across 49 networks. That is 28% of all indexed native inventory — and more Taboola ads than the Outbrain, MGID and Revcontent corpora combined. This data study lays out 30 statistics from that corpus: Taboola's scale, its vertical mix, how it compares with rival networks, and what live-capture data says about creative longevity. Every number comes from observed live ad captures, not press releases or vendor estimates.

Where these numbers come from#

Taboola publishes no ad-level data and, unlike Meta or Google, maintains no official ad library — a gap we covered when we built the independent Taboola ad library. So the only public way to measure the network is to observe it: continuously capture live public placements, store each creative with its resolved advertiser, record every geo and device observation, and trace the landing page behind the click.

A few words on what "a creative" means here, because the definition drives every count below. Captured ads are deduplicated on the creative itself — the image and headline — so a single ad seen across fifty publisher sites counts once as a creative and fifty-odd times as observations. Advertisers are resolved by following each ad's click path to its final landing domain rather than trusting the display name, which is how the index separates a brand from the tracking domains in front of it. And "live" means observed serving within the current window — this is a census of what is running, not an archive of everything that ever ran.

Creative volume is also worth calibrating as a metric. It is not spend — one creative can carry a large budget, and ten creatives can carry a small one. But at network scale the two correlate strongly: advertisers mint more creatives where they are actively testing and scaling, so a network's live-creative count is a fair proxy for how much advertiser activity it hosts, and a vertical's count is a fair proxy for how contested it is.

Three honesty notes before the numbers. First, an independent index counts what it observes — every figure here is a floor on Taboola's true totals, not a census. Second, vertical classification covers the classified subset of creatives, so vertical counts are conservative. Third, the longevity snapshot below is capped by an observation window of roughly 38 days, so "longest-running" figures mean "at least this long." For the cross-network picture these numbers sit inside, see native advertising statistics 2026.

Taboola's scale in the native ecosystem (statistics 1–8)#

1. 206,145 live Taboola creatives were in the index as of June 2026.
2. That is 28% of the entire 725,882-creative, 49-network index — more than one in four of every native ad we track.
3. Taboola's corpus is larger than Outbrain, MGID and Revcontent combined (108,573 + 62,765 + 15,789 = 187,127).
4. Taboola holds 1.9× the live creatives of Outbrain (108,573), its closest direct competitor — the full comparison is in Taboola vs Outbrain.
5. Taboola holds 3.3× the live creatives of MGID (62,765) — see MGID vs Taboola for what that gap means in practice.
6. Taboola holds 13× the live creatives of Revcontent (15,789).
7. Among all 49 tracked networks, only Microsoft Audience Network (281,839 creatives) carries more live native inventory than Taboola.
8. The advertisers behind those ads sit in an index-wide pool of 29,257 tracked advertisers — and because Taboola carries 28% of inventory, a large share of any native vertical's advertiser list runs there.

The table rewards a second look. Microsoft Audience Network's larger corpus reflects the scale of Microsoft's owned-and-operated feed; among the classic content-recommendation networks — the ones serving sponsored widgets across independent publisher sites — Taboola is the clear volume leader. The gap to Outbrain is also wider than most buyers assume: the two are spoken of as a duopoly, but by observed live inventory it is a duopoly with a definite senior partner. For advertisers, the practical read is reach and auction depth; for competitive researchers, it means a Taboola-first research workflow covers the largest single slice of open-web native activity available anywhere.

Two more index-level numbers frame everything below:

9. The index recorded 6,887,746 ad observations — repeated sightings of creatives across placements — an average of roughly 9.5 observations per creative.
10. It also holds 1,307,705 landing captures, about 1.8 per creative, which is what lets us talk about funnels and not just thumbnails.

What runs on Taboola: the vertical mix (statistics 11–17)#

Taboola's classified creatives concentrate hard into a handful of commercial verticals:

11. Health is Taboola's largest vertical: 11,982 classified live creatives.
12. Finance is second at 8,200.
13. Insurance is third at 7,422.
14. Ecommerce follows at 5,185, home & garden at 4,414, and software at 3,665.
15. The top three verticals (health + finance + insurance = 27,604 creatives) carry more than twice the volume of the next three combined (13,264).
16. Health leads finance by 46% — a bigger gap than between any other adjacent pair in Taboola's top verticals.
17. Health alone accounts for roughly 29% of Taboola's six largest classified verticals (40,868 creatives).

The concentration matters for anyone planning spend: the verticals with the deepest inventory are the ones where the auction is most contested and the creative patterns are most proven. That cuts both ways — validation and saturation arrive together. The index-wide version of this hierarchy is broken down in top native ad verticals 2026, and the advertiser-level view in who advertises on Taboola.

Why do health, finance and insurance stack so heavily here? The three share an economic shape that fits Taboola's format: high customer lifetime value, a purchase decision that benefits from explanation rather than impulse, and audiences that respond to editorial-style persuasion. A feed placement under an article is a poor place to sell a $12 impulse product and an excellent place to start a 1,500-word argument about hearing aids, refinancing or coverage gaps. The vertical mix is not an accident of who showed up — it is the format selecting for offers whose margins can pay for a click that needs warming.

Taboola versus the rest of the ecosystem (statistics 18–24)#

Cross-network comparison is where Taboola's profile gets distinctive:

18. Taboola holds roughly 49% of all classified health creatives in the entire index (11,982 of 24,472) — more than any other network, on a vertical where no rival comes close.
19. Taboola carries about 34% of the index's classified finance creatives (8,200 of 24,068).
20. Taboola carries about 33% of classified insurance creatives (7,422 of 22,427).
21. Taboola's health corpus is 3.9× Outbrain's (11,982 vs 3,102) — the single largest vertical gap between the two networks.
22. The two networks rank verticals differently: insurance is Outbrain's #1 vertical (4,345 creatives) but only Taboola's #3 — the same offer meets a different competitive feed on each.
23. MGID's #1 vertical is entertainment (13,987 creatives) — more than five times its next five verticals combined — while Taboola's mix skews heavily commercial. A campaign structure that works on MGID's entertainment-heavy feed does not transplant cleanly.
24. In ecommerce, Taboola's 5,185 classified creatives are 2.3× Outbrain's 2,277 — a meaningful depth advantage for product advertisers choosing a first network.

The porting lesson hiding in these numbers: treat each network as its own market with its own dominant buyer mix, because the surrounding feed changes how your ad reads. A health advertorial angle that thrives among Taboola's health-heavy inventory competes against different neighbors on MGID's entertainment-dominated feed — sometimes that means less direct competition and cheaper clicks, sometimes it means an audience that never clicks that kind of promise at all. The buyers who port winners successfully re-test the angle, the bid and the device split on arrival rather than assuming the receiving network behaves like the sending one.

Longevity and creative patterns from live captures (statistics 25–30)#

Because the index records when each creative is first and last observed, it can measure the one thing native advertisers most want to know about competitors: what keeps running.

25. The longest-observed Taboola creatives in the June snapshot had run 37 days and were still live when the window closed.
26. Two of the ten Taboola creatives in our sample set had hit that 37-day mark: a home-and-garden ornament ad ("My garden had no butterflies for years — then I hung one of these up") and a hearing-device ad from Audika — one impulse product, one considered health purchase, same survival.
27. Across all networks, the longest-running creatives in the same window sat at 38 days — the cap of the observation window itself, meaning the true ages are "38 days or more."
28. A negative-framing listicle ("Top 5 Shampoos To Avoid") had run 21 days — avoid-list angles, which invert the usual recommendation format, keep proving durable.
29. A "surprising household item" hair-regrowth angle had run 31 days — the everyday-object-as-mechanism hook remains one of the longest-lived structures in beauty.
30. The same "Koreans Do This Instead" skincare angle appears in the index on both Taboola and MGID from the same brand family — live evidence of cross-network angle recycling, where a proven Taboola angle gets redeployed on cheaper mid-tier inventory.

The distribution behind those standouts is as informative as the standouts themselves. The same ten-ad Taboola sample that contains two 37-day survivors also contains creatives first observed that day — fresh launches captured at zero days old — with the rest scattered across the range between. That spread is the network's testing culture made visible: advertisers continuously mint new creatives, most cycle out quickly as tests fail or fatigue, and a thin cohort of winners just keeps running. Which is exactly why runtime works as a research filter — sorting a vertical by days running separates the experiments from the annuities in one click.

Sustained runtime is the closest thing native advertising has to a public profit-and-loss statement: nobody pays for a losing ad for five straight weeks. The full argument — and how to use runtime as a research filter — is in ad longevity as a winning signal, with annotated specimens in our Taboola ad examples teardown.

What these numbers mean if you buy (or watch) Taboola traffic#

For media buyers entering the network. The vertical depth chart is your competition map. Health, finance and insurance are proven at enormous scale — 27,604 classified creatives among them — which means the angles are validated and the auctions are crowded. Softer verticals like home & garden and software offer thinner proof but thinner competition. Either way, the entry workflow is the same: study what has survived three weeks or more in your vertical before spending, using the live corpus at /spy/taboola, and learn the network's mechanics in how Taboola ads work.

For advertisers choosing between networks. Statistics 18–24 argue against treating native networks as interchangeable. Taboola's feed is where the index's health inventory concentrates; Outbrain's skews insurance and finance; MGID's is dominated by entertainment. Test order should follow inventory: launch first where your vertical already runs deep, then port winners outward — the honest cost-benefit of the network overall is covered in is Taboola worth it.

For competitive-intelligence teams. The observation and landing-capture counts (9.5 sightings and 1.8 landing captures per creative) are what turn a pile of thumbnails into intelligence: you can see not just that a competitor ran an ad, but where it appeared, for how long, and what funnel sat behind it. That is the difference between knowing a competitor is on Taboola and knowing which of their angles is paying.

For publishers. The vertical depth chart doubles as a demand map for anyone monetizing with content-recommendation widgets. Health, finance and insurance advertisers are the deepest bidder pools filling Taboola slots, which shapes both what your audience will see under your articles and which content categories attract the strongest native demand. A publisher weighing widget partners is looking at the same 30 numbers from the other side of the auction.

If you want to check any of these numbers yourself, the underlying corpus is browsable — every Taboola creative in the index carries its advertiser, first-seen and last-seen dates, geo and device observations, and captured landing page, so the statistics above can be reproduced (and will have moved) by the time you read this. That reproducibility is the point of publishing from an open index rather than a black-box report.

One closing caveat, because data studies earn trust by stating limits: everything above is an observed floor from public captures, current as of June 2026. Taboola's true totals are higher; vertical counts cover classified creatives only; and longevity figures are clipped by the observation window. The numbers will drift month to month — the shape of them, in our experience of watching the index, drifts much more slowly.