Teads Holding Co. reported second-quarter revenue of $284.6 million on August 6, 2026, a 17% decline, and withdrew its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance after the half of its business built on search-driven web traffic shed almost a third of its gross profit in twelve months.

The company published results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 before the market opened on August 6, alongside a Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that furnished the release under Item 2.02. Revenue fell $58.5 million against the prior-year quarter, gross profit fell 21% to $95.6 million, and the net loss widened to $42.5 million from $14.3 million. Basic and diluted loss per share came in at $0.44, against $0.15 a year earlier.

Teads trades on Nasdaq under the ticker TEAD and was formed by Outbrain's $900 million acquisition of the French advertising technology company of the same name, completed in February 2025. Comparisons to the 2025 half-year figures incorporate the acquired business only from February 3, 2025 onward, a footnote the company repeats in every reporting period.

Two businesses, disclosed separately for the first time

The most consequential change in this release was not a number but a structure. Management split out Ex-TAC gross profit by customer type, separating an enterprise brand and agency business from a direct response and SME business aligned with the legacy Outbrain operation.

Enterprise delivered $89 million in Ex-TAC gross profit during the quarter. Direct response and SME delivered $34 million, a 30% year-over-year decline. Those two figures sum to the $123 million total the company reported, against $144.2 million a year earlier.

According to Chief Executive Officer David Kostman on the earnings call, the enterprise side is where capital is going. "Our enterprise business, powered by connected TV growth and omni-channel outcome solutions for global brand and agencies, is our primary growth engine," he said. Advertiser spend in that segment was flat year over year in the quarter, which management framed as stabilisation after 2025 headwinds, with mid-single-digit Ex-TAC growth expected in the second half.

Applying the disclosed 30% decline to the direct response figure implies roughly $48 million in the comparable 2025 quarter, which would leave about $96 million attributable to enterprise then against $89 million now. Teads did not publish prior-year segment figures, and the rounding in the disclosed numbers limits how far that arithmetic can be pushed. What the company did state is that enterprise advertiser spend was flat and that May and June both showed positive year-over-year growth in enterprise advertiser spend.

Connected TV is the growth line, at 13% of revenue

CTV revenue grew 67% year over year, an acceleration from the roughly 50% recorded in the first quarter and the 55% recorded in the fourth quarter of 2025. Connected television accounted for 13% of second-quarter revenue, up from 7% in the same quarter of 2025.

The release and the call give slightly different absolute figures. Kostman put CTV top-line revenue at approximately $40 million; 13% of $284.6 million works out closer to $37 million. Both figures are consistent with a 67% increase from a base of about $24 million, and the gap reflects rounding in the disclosed percentage rather than a disagreement between documents.

Supply expansion drove the quarter. Teads renewed its exclusive HomeScreen partnership with LG across Europe and Asia-Pacific with extension into new markets, following the April 2026 renewal that added Italy, Greece and Cyprus. It partnered with TiVo Ads, integrating TiVo HomeScreen placements directly into Teads Ad Manager to reach 5.3 million households across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. It integrated with VIDAA Japan, which the company said unlocked 2.3 million devices as of July 1, 2026. Kostman put the global reach of the HomeScreen footprint at more than 500 million screens.

The company also introduced Teads CTV Ensemble, a unified suite combining HomeScreen and InStream inventory, which was announced in June 2026. A partnership with Lumen Research bringing attention measurement to CTV HomeScreen placements globally was expanded during the period, extending the arrangement disclosed on May 6, 2026.

Omnichannel adoption moved in the same direction. Branding customers running omnichannel campaigns represented 16% of the relevant spend base, up from 9% in the second quarter of 2025. The two source documents describe that base differently: the press release calls it 16% of CTV spend, while the earnings call describes it as 16% of Q2 branding revenue, approaching an 18% full-year target. The denominators are not equivalent, and the company did not reconcile them.

Joint business partnerships were renewed with Stellantis, Warner Brothers and Dyson. The press release names LVMH as the fourth brand; the call transcript refers to Louis Vuitton, a subsidiary of that group.

Where the profit went

Traffic acquisition costs fell to $161.2 million from $198.9 million, a steeper proportional decline than revenue, which lifted Ex-TAC gross margin to 43.4% from 42.0%. Reported gross margin moved the other way, down to 33.6% from 35.1%, because other cost of revenue rose to $27.8 million from $23.9 million.

Chief Financial Officer Jason Kiviat attributed the margin mix improvement to customer type rather than pricing. Enterprise customers, he said, carry substantially higher Ex-TAC margins than direct response and SME customers, and the shift in weighting between them lifted the blended figure even as the absolute total shrank.

Operating expenses fell to $111.2 million from $122.5 million. Sales and marketing dropped to $70.3 million from $79.7 million, research and development to $11.4 million from $13.3 million, while general and administrative edged up to $28.4 million from $27.9 million. Restructuring charges of $1.2 million compared with $1.7 million.

Even so, adjusted EBITDA came in at $7.0 million against $27.0 million, a 74% fall, and against a guidance range of $14 million to $22 million issued alongside first-quarter results on May 7, 2026. Ex-TAC gross profit of $123.4 million landed inside the guided $121 million to $131 million band. The miss was on costs, not revenue.

Kiviat itemised the variance. Timing and cutoff of expenses accounted for roughly half of it, across discretionary areas including travel and entertainment and marketing, plus transitional costs from migrating the company's cloud platform to a new provider. Currency movements, largely in the Israeli shekel, worked against the cost base. Bad debts remained elevated, which Kiviat linked primarily to prior customers affected by quality initiatives implemented during 2025. He said the company expects a step down in cost in the third quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA as a share of Ex-TAC gross profit fell to 5.7% from 18.7%. Across six months the ratio was 3.3% against 15.2%.

The balance sheet arithmetic

Cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities stood at $91.0 million at June 30, 2026, comprising $88.0 million in cash and $3.0 million in short-term securities. That compares with $128.2 million of cash and equivalents at December 31, 2025. Kiviat said the company also has access to $40 million through a revolving credit facility.

Total debt obligations were $614.5 million. The bulk is the $607.4 million carrying value of 10.000% senior secured notes due 2030, with a principal amount of $628.2 million, plus $7.1 million outstanding under a short-term overdraft facility assumed with the acquisition.

Interest expense for the quarter was $17.4 million, exceeding the $15.6 million loss from operations. Over six months, interest expense of $34.8 million ran against adjusted EBITDA of $7.7 million. Total stockholders' equity closed the period at $7.4 million, down from $95.4 million at the end of 2025, with accumulated deficit at $767.8 million. Operating cash flow was positive $9.2 million in the quarter but negative $25.7 million across the half.

Asked about balance sheet options, Kostman said the company continues to evaluate opportunities to strengthen it and would report anything specific. That language echoes Kiviat's first-quarter reference to opportunistic alternatives.

Guidance withdrawn

The outlook section of the release runs to two sentences. Citing volatility in the direct response and SME business and the execution of strategic initiatives, the company suspended guidance, including the previously provided full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA figure.

That figure was approximately $100 million, set on March 5, 2026 alongside fourth-quarter results that carried a $352.1 million goodwill impairment, and reaffirmed on May 7. Half-year adjusted EBITDA now stands at $7.7 million. Reaching the withdrawn target would have required $92 million across the remaining two quarters.

Teads also withdrew full-year guidance in August 2025, after the merger-related restructuring that cut about 15% of the workforce.

Publisher page views and the native problem

The clearest new datapoint for publishers came in the question and answer session. Asked by Laura Martin of Needham how much of the direct response decline traced to changes in search, Kostman said page view declines vary by publisher and by country, with some at 10% or 15% and others higher. "Overall, on the premium side of our publishers, it varies by country, but I would say it's in the 15%-25% of page view decline," he said.

That is a widening from the 10% to 15% range the company disclosed for the third quarter of 2025, a figure that stood as one of the first quantifications of AI search impact by a platform with direct visibility across thousands of publisher sites. It sits alongside Chartbeat measurements showing small publishers losing 60% of search referral traffic over two yearsand continued regional declines through the second quarter of 2026.

Kostman separated the traffic effect from a deliberate one. A portion of the direct response decline was self-directed: the company exited certain low-margin direct response accounts and pruned lower-quality open web supply to enforce brand safety standards for brand partners. Most of those actions were taken during 2025.

The product response is EngageOS, an operating system for publishers that unifies editorial content and advertising inventory to optimise revenue across a whole reader session rather than an individual page view. Launched on June 11, 2026 with Magnite as programmatic demand partner, it is in testing with publishers including Penske Media, The Arena Group and Scripps, with Kostman describing significant lifts in yield during those tests. He also said the company is in dialogue with AI companies about opening supply into emerging large language model channels.

What this means for media buyers

Three disclosures carry directly into planning conversations.

First, concentration. Kostman said more than 90% of enterprise-side billings are billed to the large agency groups, and that traction is running through integrations at the AI level on activation and planning. For advertisers buying through holding companies, the platform's enterprise roadmap is being shaped inside those relationships rather than in self-serve.

Second, placement economics. Kostman said the omnichannel product mostly runs in the in-feed placement after the first or second paragraph, which he characterised as insulated from the traffic trends hitting other parts of the page. End-of-article inventory is where EngageOS is aimed. That distinction determines which open web placements retain pricing power as page views fall.

Third, the Google exposure. The forward-looking statements section of the release names the company's litigation against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. as a risk factor, including the uncertainty and timing of any resolution and the amount of damages recoverable, if any. Teads filed that complaint on August 3, 2026 in the Southern District of New York, three days before these results, and separately disclosed retaliation by Google as a business risk in the same filing.

The pattern is not confined to one company. Criteo cut its full-year guidance on August 5, 2026 after second-quarter revenue fell 11%. Across the open web, platforms that monetise search-referred page views are reporting the same compression at different magnitudes, while the growth line sits on screens that were never search-referred at all.

Teads employs around 1,700 people across more than 30 countries and reports direct partnerships with more than 10,000 publishers and 20,000 advertisers. Its conference call replay remains accessible until August 20, 2026.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Teads Holding Co. (Nasdaq: TEAD), the omnichannel advertising platform formed by Outbrain's $900 million acquisition of Legacy Teads in February 2025. Chief Executive Officer David Kostman and Chief Financial Officer Jason Kiviat presented the results. Kostman signed the Form 8-K.

What: Second-quarter 2026 revenue of $284.6 million, down 17% year over year; gross profit of $95.6 million, down 21%; Ex-TAC gross profit of $123.4 million, down 14%; adjusted EBITDA of $7.0 million, down 74% and below the guided $14 million to $22 million range; net loss of $42.5 million, or $0.44 per share. The company split out Ex-TAC gross profit by segment for the first time, showing $89 million from enterprise and $34 million from direct response and SME, the latter down 30%. CTV revenue grew 67% and reached 13% of total revenue. Full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance of approximately $100 million was suspended.

When: The results cover the three months ended June 30, 2026 and were published on August 6, 2026, with an investor call the same morning at 8:30 am ET and a replay available until August 20, 2026.

Where: Teads is headquartered at 111 West 19th Street, New York, with around 1,700 employees in more than 30 countries. CTV supply expansion during the quarter covered Europe and Asia-Pacific through LG, North America and the United Kingdom through TiVo Ads, and Japan through VIDAA.

Why: Two parts of the business are moving in opposite directions. Connected television and enterprise brand demand are growing, while the direct response and small business operation built on open web page views is contracting as search-referred traffic to premium publishers falls by 15% to 25%. Cost overruns in the quarter and the unpredictability of the declining segment removed management's confidence in a full-year forecast, leaving a business with $614.5 million of debt at 10.000% interest and $91.0 million of cash to fund a transition toward higher-margin inventory.