What: Content recommendation platform Outbrain acquired early this month Revee, a technology company that allows publishers to track the revenue value of content in real-time. Using Revee’s technology, Outbrain has now launched Outbrain Automatic Yield.
Why it matters: Outbrain’s Automatic Yield allows publishers to measure the revenue value of their content in real time and connect content programming and revenue delivery with a single piece of technology.
Outbrain, a global premium content recommendation platform acquired early this month Revee, a technology company that allows publishers to track the revenue value of content in real-time. Using Revee’s technology, Outbrain has now launched Outbrain Automatic Yield – a content recommendation solution that enables publishers to monetize audiences with a real-time understanding of each piece of content.
The launch of Outbrain’s Automatic Yield allows publishers – for the first time – to measure the revenue value of their content in real time. Outbrain solves one of the core problems digital publishers have faced from the beginning: how to connect content programming and revenue delivery with a single piece of technology.
Time Inc. is the first media partner to implement Outbrain Automatic Yield and will initially roll out across Fortune and Entertainment Weekly, two of its core U.S. properties.
The company worked with eight publishers on the beta test for Automatic Yield including Penske Media Corp., Independent Journal Review, The Daily Caller, and Singapore Press Holdings. The beta publishers, which will continue using the product, have seen up to a 110% lift in incremental revenue from using the tool, with limited tradeoff between revenue and click-through rates.
“Publishers are struggling to keep growing their audiences,” said Matt Crenshaw, Vice President of Product Marketing at Outbrain. “Facebook drove 32 percent less traffic to publishers from January to February last year, and Google and other inbound channels are getting more competitive. Publishers are frustrated and need a new solution. With Outbrain Automatic Yield, we’ve created an easy way for publishers to drive profitable traffic, ensuring user personalization and revenue delivery work together in real-time.”
Media companies serve so many different types of advertising with different flighting and targeting parameters, causing the value of a page or video to fluctuate wildly, even over the span of a single day. In early tests, Outbrain found that a single piece of content may fluctuate 262 percent over the course of a few hours. By isolating the page or video value in real time and driving interested users to this content, Outbrain is giving publishers an entirely new way to drive revenue that didn’t previously exist.
Publishers’content product, promotion, ad selling, and ad flighting typically live in separate silos managed by several teams.In this sense, the tool aims to address the inefficiencies in how publishers deliver revenue.
According to Matt Crenshaw, head of global distribution, Outbrain, said the tool also tries to help publishers with content syndication decisions: “By understanding the revenue value of the content on their sites, they can determine what’s worth syndicating on places like Facebook. Content syndication decisions are now being based on user engagement, but every decision a publisher makes needs to be made with revenue and growth in mind,” Crenshaw said.
“Automatic Yield solves one of the core problems digital publishers have faced from the beginning: how to connect content programming and revenue delivery with a single piece of technology,” stated Yaron Galai, co-founder & CEO, Outbrain.
Outbrain is also actively pursuing plans to grow the adoption of Outbrain Automatic Yield beyond the U.S. Other beta partners at launch in the U.S. include Rodale.
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