Outbrain

Outbrain Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	Internet
Founded	2006
Founder	Yaron Galai, Ori Lahav[1]
Headquarters	New York City[2]
Key people	Yaron Galai, CEO
Products	Content discovery platform
Website	outbrain.com

Outbrain is an advertising-focused content discovery platform whose content marketing module is designed to help Internet publishers increase web traffic by presenting sponsored website links, with the goal of inducing visitors to make impulse purchases.^[3] It provides recommendations for several media types, including online, news, video,^[4] and mobile.^{[5] [6]}

Products

Outbrain uses behavioral targeting to recommend articles, slideshows, blog posts, photos or videos to a reader, rather than relying on a more basic "related items" widget. The sites with the recommended articles pay Outbrain for this service, and Outbrain pays the site on which the links appear.

Outbrain claims to be installed on more than 35,000 websites,^[7] and that it serves over 150 billion recommendations and 15 billion page views per month. Outbrain claims its recommendations reach over 87% of US Internet users.^[8]

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,^[9] and Ori Lahav, previously of Shopping.com, acquired by eBay in 2005.^[10] 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.^[11]

Financing

The company, as of 2014, had 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.^[12] 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),^[13] content curation platform, Scribit (December 2012),^[14] and predictive analytics company, Visual Revenue (March 2013).^[15]

Technology

Outbrain's algorithm module determines which content within the network is 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 pays publishers to put its links on their sites.^[16] External sites that employ the traffic acquisition service pay on a daily pay-per-click or cost-per-click basis with links to third-party content appearing as recommendations alongside editorial content from the web's biggest publishers. Approximately half of that revenue is paid to the site which presented the Outbrain link.

Brands and publishers, for example Newsmedia websites, are able to engage their audience on-site 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. 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.^[17]

Reception

Outbrain has often been compared with competitor Taboola.^[18][19] 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.^[19][20][21]

Both Outbrain and Taboola have been described by Internet commentators as alternatives to Google AdSense that content publishers should consider for revenue streams.^[22][23]

In November 2012, in response to criticism of it for showing spam links, Outbrain decided to cut off showing spam 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.^[24] However, there has been continued criticism of the quality of recommendations offered by Outbrain.^[20]

In August 2014, an article in Fortune noted the fierce competition between Taboola and Outbrain and both of their problems with spam recommendations and nearly all their clients promoting known scams.^[19]

See also

• Adblade
• Infolinks
• VigLink
• Zemanta

References

External links

• Test of Content Recommendation Platforms
• Review of Outbrain and competitors