A review of Outbrain.com. Outbrain is a content discovery platform whose eponymous Content marketing module offers to help Internet publishers increase web traffic to their websites.

1. Outbrain.com
Get more Web Traffic

2. What is Outbrain.com
Outbrain is a content discovery platform on the web.
What does it mean?
Essentially it’s a traffic generating tool which uses it’s technology to help place your content on various
relevant websites and web sources across the world.
Here’s what they say:
Outbrain is a content discovery platform focused on helping people find great content. There are two ways
to use us: install our technology for smarter engagement on your website and/or amplify your content
across our network of partner publisher sites.

3. How does Outbrain Work?
How does it work?
There are mainly two ways
1. Engage Your Audience
Using this method one can offer recommendations and help your audience discover more content on your site that
is interesting to them. Add a new revenue stream by Offering recommendations to high-quality third-party content
on other sites. ( The engage tool isn’t relevant to Advertisers. It’s for Publishers to make money out of. Only if the
blog has 10 million views per month)
2. Amplify Your Content
Grow your audience by distributing your content on other sites, where people are looking for something new to
discover. The audience coming from Outbrain is already in content consumption mode, therefore more engaged
and more likely to stay longer.

4. How does Outbrain work?
How it works
Outbrain looks beyond related links to help people find interesting content through personalized
recommendations.
This is what they Say:
We've all been there. You finished reading that great news story or watched a video on your favorite site.
You're faced with that moment of "now what?" There's so much great content out on the web just waiting
for the right audience to find it.
For years, content recommendations have been driven by relatedness. But we've found that the best
way to deeply engage audiences is to tailor our recommendations for each and every person and
instead serve up content that is interesting to them but not necessarily related

5. How does Outbrain work?
Amplify Tool
1. Basically they have something called Amplify, self serve tool. Using this tool one can link their blog feed. (e.g.
http://blog.company.com/feed and all the articles on that blog will be pulled up within their aggregator. With
Outbrain Amplify, links to your content appear as recommendations at the bottom of articles on top publisher
sites where people are looking for something new to discover. Their self-serve platform allows you to control
what you want to pay, and better yet, it’s as simple as sending us a URL. (It’s CPC)
2. Then you get options to create a campaign just like you create a media buy campaign in Facebook ads.
3. Your RSS feeds will be displayed. As of now, it pulled 10 articles on the blog when I tried. You have options to
add more articles. Alternatively you can add content automatically from RSS feeds.
4. What Outbrain will do is dish out your relevant content based on the bid that you keep, to various other sites
as recommended. (It could be widgets on Blogs which have over 10 million views or on various other web
sources where Outbrain is tied in to)

6. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
Basically we decide what we are willing to
pay and what is the per day budget. Then
add start and end date. We can chose
geography of where the content has to be
pushed to.

7. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
Next step is to pull your
articles from your blog feed.
You can automatically or
manually do that.
Once done you can add credit
card information and check
out.
Just like FB, they’ll take some
24 hours max, to approve
your content. There are some
basic guidelines.

8. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
This is how it’ll show your
feed. It’ll pull the latest 10
artiles. You can enable them
or chose to add other articles.

9. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
This is how it’ll show your
feed. It’ll pull the latest 10
artiles. You can enable them
or chose to add other articles.

10. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
This is how the reports would be like. Right now it’s not active

11. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
This is how the reports would be like. Right now it’s not active

12. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
Reports.
This is a screen shot from one
of the blogs of a person who
used this tool for their blog.
http://www.conversationage
nt.com/2012/05/content-
recommendation-engine-
outbrain.html

13. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
Reports.
This is a screen shot from one
of the blogs of a person who
used this tool for their blog.
http://www.conversationage
nt.com/2012/05/content-
recommendation-engine-
outbrain.html

14. Outbrain.com – Amplify tool Walkthrough
Reports.
This is a screen shot from one
of the blogs of a person who
used this tool for their blog.
http://www.conversationagent
.com/2012/05/content-
recommendation-engine-
outbrain.html

15. Outbrain.com – How will it help us?
• First thing: It’s not like Facebook/Google media buy. Relevance is not contextual alone. (keywords, demographicbased etc.) It digs a little
deeper to find similarity and overall content topicality. That way, where your blog is fed is in a more relevant network.
• Based on their content recommendation algorithm also classifies your content into:
• Popularity: that is trending up in popularity on the site
• Contextual: related to the page the person is currently on
• Behavioral: based on audience dynamics. E.g., what people with similar reading habits have read, that is not mainstream popular, and that
the person has not read before
• Personal: within broad categories the person reads and not necessarily related to the page they are on.
• According to Outbrain, sites get an average 5-10% lift in views. They also get a revenue stream when readers click over to other sites
through the widget.
• Essentially we could use this for companies whose blog reach isn’t that great and they want to reach out to relevant places. Saves on time
and efficiency, than just advertising on generically social networks or Google searches.
• Also this will help in ensuring that great responses will come on your blog if it’s niche audience that’s being reached out to. A. Adds a lot of
value to your client per se. B. It helps build in good leads.
• Overall a good tool especially for niche blogs and places which are hard to find on the web / through generic media buy.

16. THANK YOU
Srinivas Kulkarni
Social Web Advocate
@srinistuff