Outbrain

Products

Outbrain is an advertising company. It 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's promoted articles are found on more than 35,000 websites, and serves over 250 billion recommendations and 15 billion page views per month. Outbrain's recommendations reach over 87% of US Internet users.

History

Outbrain first marketed its content discovery platform in 2006.

It was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, who were both in Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million,. Lahav worked at Shopping.com, acquired by eBay in 2005.

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.

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. HarbourVest Partners led Outbrain's most recent round of funding in October 2013, raising $35 million.

Acquisitions

Outbrain has acquired four companies—related content recommendation platform, Surphace (February 2011), content curation platform, Scribit (December 2012), and predictive analytics company, Visual Revenue (March 2013). In early 2016, Outbrain acquired technology company Revee.

Business model

Outbrain pays publishers to put its links on their sites. 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 conspicuously as "You May Also Like..." or "We Recommend" often leading unsuspecting users into thinking of click-bait advertisements as original editorial content. 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 remotely relevant and unverified content.

Reception

Outbrain has often been compared with competitor Taboola. One way that Outbrain claims to distinguish itself from Taboola is that it tries to pre-filter spammy links before displaying them, whereas Taboola has a feature called Taboola Choice, where users can offer feedback on what recommendations they do not like.

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

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. However, there has been continued criticism of the quality of recommendations offered by Outbrain.

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.