Taboola struck a deal with Microsoft to sell display ads for MSN.com, Microsoft Outlook, Games and Microsoft's broader Office Suite, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.

Why it matters: It marks a significant milestone for the ad tech giant as it looks to expand beyond the native advertising business for the first time since it launched nearly two decades ago.

Zoom in: Last month, Taboola announced the launch of a new platform called Realize that allows it to sell performance ads, including display and social media advertising formats like vertical video, across the open web.

• With Realize, Taboola will focus on selling performance advertising inventory, not broader brand purpose ads.
• While it will sell video ads, Taboola will focus on social media video that's part of performance advertising campaigns, not premium video like connected TV, Singolda said.

Between the lines: Powering Taboola's shift to display advertising is the enormous amount of first-party data it's collected over the years from its own clients, Singolda said.

• Taboola has relationships with more than 18,000 advertisers and 9,000 publishers globally in the native advertising space.
• That gives it plenty of data that can be used to optimize the display campaigns it will now power on the open web.

Reality check: The companies that currently dominate the display ad market, Meta and Google, have been successful because of their enormous troves of first-party data.

• Singolda said he sees a strong opportunity to pull display ad dollars away from those two companies, as well as other ad tech firms, because of Taboola's existing access to first-party data.

The big picture: Taboola has built a sizable business since it launched in 2017, mostly selling native ad placements at the bottom of articles across the web. It's pushed to expand its business since going public in early 2021, mostly by striking partnerships with Big Tech firms to sell ads on their behalf.

• Last year, Taboola announced an exclusive deal with Apple to sell native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps in the U.S.

• In 2023, it announced a 30-year ad deal with Yahoo estimated to be worth $1 billion annually.
• The company, which has had a strategic partnership with Microsoft for a decade, launched an open web audience network with Microsoft in 2021.

What to watch: Singolda said Realize could help publishers capture more programmatic display advertising revenue.

• "There's a big opportunity here to make publishers grow," Singolda said. "If we do a good job with Realize, it's not only good for advertisers, but hopefully it's going to pay more to publishers than what they've lost over the last three years with programmatic revenue going down."