Outbrain

Outbrain is a content discovery platform whose eponymous Content marketing module offers to help Internet publishers increase web traffic to their websites. It does so by presenting them with links to related and interesting articles and other trusted content.^[1] Outbrain provides Content Recommendation for several media-types - online, video,^[2] and mobile.^[3]

Products

Content publishers seek to attract and retain visitors as their revenue is generally generated through advertising. Outbrain uses behavioral targeting to recommend interesting articles, slideshows, blog posts, photos or videos to a reader, rather than relying on a more basic 'related items' widget. This is done to encourage the reader to stay on the site, increasing engagement and, ultimately, generating an increase in advertising revenue.

Outbrain is at work across a large number of global publishers, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Fast Company.

Outbrain also works with a large network of brands and agencies, including Starcom, Digitas, Mindshare, American Express, P&G, Colgate-Palmolive, Allstate, General Electric, General Mills and Exxon.^[4]

Outbrain is installed on more than 100,000 websites, and serves over 130 billion recommendations and 15 billion page views per month. Through its recommendations, Outbrain reaches over 87% of the U.S. Internet population.^[5]

History

Outbrain, first to market with its content discovery platform in 2006, was founded by experienced entrepreneurs, Yaron Galai, who had sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363m,^[6] and Ori Lahav, who had previously been with Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2005.^[7] The company is headquartered in New York with 13 global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Paris, Munich, Milan, Madrid, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, Singapore, and Sydney.^[8]

Financing

The company has undergone 5 rounds of funding for a total of $99M and is backed by Index Ventures, Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and HarbourVest Partners.^[9] Outbrain received its most recent round of funding, led by HarbourVest Partners, in October 2013, raising $35M.

Acquisitions

Outbrain has acquired three companies - related content recommendation platform, Surphace (Feb 2011),^[10] content curation platform, Scribit (Dec 2012),^[11] and predictive analytics company, Visual Revenue (March 2013).^[12]

Technology

The Outbrain content recommendation module determines which content within the network is interesting and relevant to individual users. A larger set of algorithms is run in parallel to determine a set of candidate recommendations. The decision of which recommendations to serve the user is made by machine learning techniques. The algorithmic methods Outbrain uses can be divided into three categories - contextual algorithms, behavioral algorithms, and personal algorithms.

Business Model

Outbrain has a unique business model, allowing hosts to get the recommendation engine for free. External sites that employ the traffic acquisition service pay on a daily pay per click(PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) basis with links to third-party content appearing as recommendations alongside editorial content from the web's biggest publishers.

Brands and publishers are able to engage their audience onsite by surfacing their own editorial content they've published in the past, displayed as "We Recommend" or "You May Also Like..." The company's "From Around the Web" tool also provides a way for publishers to buy and sell traffic by providing third-party links to relevant content.^[13] Large publishers (more than 10M page views per month) are able to enter into Outbrain's revenue-share program, opening a new revenue stream for publishers. The content recommendations are served across the publisher network based on a combination of CPC and click-through rate (CTR).

References

External links

• Official website
• Official blog
• Review of Outbrain and competitors
• Outbrain acquires Content Curation platform Scribit