Taboola, the native advertising giant known for placing sponsored content modules beneath news stories on sites like USA Today and NBC News, has named Krishan Bhatia its first chief business officer.
At Taboola, Bhatia will be charged with driving revenue through global sales and partnerships across Taboola’s full product portfolio.
Most recently, Bhatia served as vice president at Amazon, where he scaled Prime Video’s advertising business to new markets across the world, built out a brand partnerships team, and expanded the company’s live sports offering.
Prior to his time at Amazon, Bhatia spent over a decade at NBCUniversal, where in his role as president and chief business officer of global advertising and partnerships he grew the Peacock business.
“I’ve worked at the intersection of media and technology for the past 30 years, and I believe this company is very uniquely positioned to be able to take advantage of some of the key tailwinds and technology developments in the industry,” Bhatia told ADWEEK.
He pointed to Taboola’s relationships with approximately 15,000 marketers and 9,000 publishers globally, which he said will serve it well at a moment when brand and performance marketing are converging. “[This] puts Taboola in a really unique position to be able to drive greater efficacy for marketers small and large, and also serve its publisher partners with incremental yield and, increasingly, technology solutions that will help grow their businesses.”
He arrives at a pivotal moment for the adtech company, which has spent the last year pushing aggressively beyond native advertising. It launched DeeperDive, a publisher-embedded generative AI tool for surfacing content from across the given publisher’s site, and rolled out Realize, a performance advertising platform for ad placements across a broader range of formats and media inventory. Then, in November, it debuted a connected TV product with Paramount meant to attract small- and medium-sized advertisers.
Shares of Taboola are down 15% over the last year. The company will report its Q4 and full-year 2025 financial results on Feb. 25.
In the months ahead, the new CBO will focus on driving adoption of Realize and DeeperDive among publishers, driving investment from mid-market and enterprise advertisers, and establishing new partnerships—with holdcos and indie agencies, marketers, technology providers, and a wider set of advertisers.
CEO Adam Singolda called Bhatia “the right person for the job” due to his experience building digital ad businesses and working on the intersection of video and performance advertising at both Amazon Prime and Peacock.
Asked why Taboola decided to bring on its first-ever CBO at this moment, Singolda said that Taboola has been “laying all the pieces together” on both the publisher and advertiser sides of the business for a decade—and now, it’s time to hit the gas pedal.
