Outbrain

Outbrain Inc.
Private
Industry Internet
Founded 2006
Founder Yaron Galai, Ori Lahav[1]
Headquarters New York, United States
Key people
 Yaron Galai, CEO
Products Content discovery platform
Website outbrain.com

Outbrain is a content recommendation platform whose content marketing module offers to help Internet publishers increase web traffic by presenting them with links to related and interesting articles and other trusted content.[2] It provides recommendation for several media types, including online, video,[3] and mobile.[4]

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 claims to be installed on more than 35,000 websites,[5] and that it serves over 150 billion recommendations and 15 billion page views per month. Outbrain claims its recommendations reach over 87% of U.S. Internet users.[6]

History

Outbrain first marketed its content discovery platform in 2006. It was founded by Yaron Galai, who sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million,[7] and Ori Lahav, previously of Shopping.com, acquired by eBay in 2005.[8] 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.[9]

Financing

The company has undergone five rounds of funding for a total of $99 million and is backed by Index Ventures, Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and HarbourVest Partners.[10] HarbourVest Partners led Outbrain's most recent round of funding in October 2013, raising $35 million.

Acquisitions

Outbrain has acquired three companies—related content recommendation platform, Surphace (February 2011),[11] content curation platform, Scribit (December 2012),[12] and predictive analytics company, Visual Revenue (March 2013).[13]

Technology

Outbrain's algorithm 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 numerous categories, some examples are: contextual, behavioral and personal algorithms. Because Outbrain's algorithms make use of HTTP cookies planted on the local computers of the end users, any clearing of those cookies will affect the recommendations that Outbrain makes.

Business model

Outbrain provides its 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, for example Newsmedia websites, are able to engage their audience onsite by surfacing their own editorial content that they have published in the past, displayed as "You May Also Like..." or "We Recommend". These take the form of tracked links that are routed through Outbrain's servers. Also, the Outbrain "From Around the Web" tool also provides a way for publishers to buy and sell traffic by providing third-party links to relevant content.[14] Large publishers with more than 10 million monthly page views are able to take advantage of Outbrain's revenue-share program. The content recommendations are served across the publisher network based on a combination of cost-per-click and the click-through rate.

Reception

Outbrain has often been compared with competitor Taboola.[15][16] One way that Outbrain claims to distinguish itself from Taboola is that it tries to pre-filter spammy links before displaying them, whereas Taboola takes pride in Taboola Choice, its feature where users can offer feedback on what recommendations they do not like.[16][17][18]

Both Outbrain and Taboola have been described by Internet commentators as alternatives to Google AdSense that content publishers should consider for revenue streams.[19][20]

In November 2012, in response to criticism of it for showing spammy links, Outbrain decided to cut off showing spammy links, and stated that doing so would cause it a 25% revenue cut, but that it was important for its long-term reputation with publishers and users.[21] However, there has been continued criticism of the quality of recommendations offered by Outbrain, such as that in an article on Priceonomics in April 2014.[17]

In August 2014, an article in Fortune noted the fierce competition between Taboola and Outbrain and both of their problems with spammy recommendations.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Ori Lahav interview on Startup Camel Podcast". Startup Camel. Retrieved 28 February 2015.
  2. ↑ Boyd, E.B. "Outbrain's Content Recommending Ways Seduce Readers To Stick Around". 14 Dec 2011.
  3. ↑ "Outbrain for Video". 2012.
  4. ↑ Galai, Yaron "Introducing Outbrain for Mobile". 3 Aug 2011.
  5. ↑ "Outbrain Technology Analysis", Analysis by SimilarTech
  6. ↑ [comScore, March 2013.]
  7. ↑ It Took Yaron Galai Four Startups to Build the One He Always Wanted to Build | PandoDaily
  8. ↑ Meet the Team | Outbrain
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ Crunchbase. "Outbrain".
  11. ↑ Marketwired. "Outbrain Acquires Surphace, Creates Market Leader for Content Discovery". 02 Feb 2011.
  12. ↑ Kafka, Peter. "Content-Recommender Outbrain Buys Content-Fetcher Scribit". 11 Dec 2012.
  13. ↑ Galai,Yaron. "Outbrain Acquires Visual Revenue, Inc.". 07 March 2013.
  14. ↑ Roberts, Jeff John (2013-01-31). "Outbrain wants to be the Google AdWords of content recommendation: here's its plan". paidContent. Retrieved 2014-03-09.
  15. ↑ Jeff John Roberts (March 28, 2013). ""Recommended for you": the fight to decide what you read next". GigaOm. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Griffith, Erin (August 18, 2014). "How Taboola and Outbrain are battling a bad reputation... and each other". Fortune. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "How Journalism Promotes The Internet's Shadiest Scams". Priceonomics. April 23, 2014. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  18. ↑ Lawler, Ryan (September 4, 2013). "Taboola Now Lets You Filter Out Content Recommendations That You Don’t Want To See". Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  19. ↑ Taub, Alexander (March 28, 2013). "http://www.forbes.com/sites/alextaub/2013/03/28/how-two-israeli-companies-are-leading-the-pack-in-the-adsense-for-content-space/". Forbes. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  20. ↑ "17 Best Google AdSense Alternatives to Make Money From Your Blog". The Tecnica. April 24, 2014. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  21. ↑ Jason Del Rey (November 8, 2012). "Outbrain Expects 25% Revenue Hit As It Cuts Off Spammy Content Marketers. Move Seeks to Eliminate Deceptive Headlines and Get-Rich-Quick Schemes to Improve Quality". Adage. Retrieved September 27, 2014.

External links