What: Media company Time Inc. has struck a multi-year agreement with content discovery platform Outbrain to adopt its’ proprietary technology stack to deliver content recommendations to its audiences.
Why it matters: The content-recommendation space has grown rapidily as it pushes traffic around the web. By using content recommendations services major publishers can derive significant revenues as they offer their digital properties to drive traffic to other sites who pay for the inbound traffic. It is unusual for content recommendation services to be exclusive and for a revenue figures to be announced publicly as is the case in this Time Inc. Outbrain deal.
Magazine publisher Time Inc. and Outbrain Inc., a global content discovery platform, have announced an exclusive multi-year agreement that will see Time Inc. enhance its digital strategy by deploying the full suite of Outbrain’s solutions for seamlessly surfacing content that is relevant to audiences across its global portfolio. The partnership is worth more than US $100 million for Time Inc. over the course of the agreement.
To date, Time Inc. had been working with a combination of companies content-recommendation widgets which help push traffic around the web.As part of this agreement, Outbrain, also a “content discovery” company, will now power content recommendations on renowned brands such as Time, People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle, Real Simple, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine. Additionally, it will provide Time Inc. with tools for their editorial team, empowering editors to better program and optimize content to meet their KPIs.
Time Inc. is also going to tap Outbrain’s existing premium publisher network to drive incremental engaged audiences to its digital properties.
Time Inc’s works with content brands such as People, Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and Real Simple to deliver valued content within brand-safe environments to a highly engaged audience. The company has experienced significant digital growth over the past year and currently boasts more than six billion page views per quarter and 131 million unique users per month, globally. Time Inc. announced revenues of US$821 million in the third quarter, but its ad sales and circulation fell during that period.
Outbrain place links below articles published across a variety of websites, including CNN.com, Slate and ESPN. Media companies and marketers pay Outbrain to place those links on publishers’ sites so as to drive traffic to their content. In exchange, Outbrain shares this revenue with the publishers where the links appear. The platform has offices in more than 11 global territories and partners with publishers and marketers in over 55 countries, including the U.S., UK, France, Japan, India and Brazil. Worldwide, it now serves over 190 billion recommendations per month to consumers in over 150 countries—with more than 561 million unique users in September 2014 according to comScore.
Time Inc. Chairman and CEO, Joe Ripp said: “This provides marketers with an ideal environment to deliver their messaging. Outbrain’s focus on audience experience and surfacing optimized content recommendations was a key to launching this partnership. It maximizes the monetization of our audience to other content publishers. And, it provides key insights and analytics about our core digital users.”
“We are delighted to announce our agreement with Time Inc. and believe that smart and innovative companies like it are the lifeblood of the new look digital media industry. Outbrain began as a straightforward recommendation product, but we have innovated, adapted and evolved into a platform that serves multiple publisher constituencies—the business, editorial and product teams—affording our partners the flexibility to embrace digital opportunities and continue to deliver what audiences crave,” said Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and CEO of Outbrain .
The agreement is said to be effect on November 15.
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