Outbrain (Teads)

How it happened

Outbrain is a content-recommendation adtech company — the firm behind the 'sponsored content' boxes under online articles — that went public in July 2021 at about a $1.07B market value. A brutal digital-ad market and the decline of its publisher-network model crushed the stock roughly 93%; in 2025 it acquired its larger rival Teads and renamed itself Teads Holding, worth a fraction of its IPO. Glassdoor reviews from the slide counted repeated layoff rounds in 2022-23 — with trust eroding, reviewers wrote, as leadership promises went unkept — alongside frozen salary reviews and shrinking perks; after the merger, reviewers from both legacy companies described an integration that still felt like two firms bolted together, with veteran staff leaving in waves.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.