MediaWeek is reporting on Outbrain’s move into non-transparent paid link advertising.
Are advertisers the new aggregators? A company called Outbrain thinks so and is seriously stretching the definition of contextual relevancy by letting advertisers actually become distributors of content.
It’s straddling the worlds of advertising and content by placing advertiser links on its distribution network of sites like USA Today and The Washington Post. One client, American Express, uses Outbrain to send traffic to its own content site. Another, Ford, might pay to distribute a car review on caranddriver.com.
New York-based Outbrain tries to ensure the ad-sponsored links look like editorial, and that’s a big difference between this and other contextual ads. The advertisers are invisible to the reader.
From the company’s promotional video below, it looks like Outbrain has more going for it than non-transparent paid link advertising, which is good. Clicking a link has to lead to incremental value, or it’s nothing more than an annoyance, one that will deteriorate trust between publisher and reader.
Outbrain Thumbnail Widget from Outbrain on Vimeo.
Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai said the company doesn’t hide the fact that the paid links are ad-supported and that the overarching goal is to publish links readers like. He said Outbrain would take down an advertiser-supplied link if readers don’t click on it. “We take the high ground,” he said.
These paid links masquerading as editorial as going to backfire one way or the other. If they are effective then they will drive publishers readers to a competing publisher to consumer content. If they don’t work, the advertisers wont continue to advertise. So the fact that their are paid links should cause publishers to worry that they are taking a very small amount of money upfront and are slowly migrating their user base to other sites. The other issue is that the links simply aren’t marked as paid. This is a clear violation of most sites editorial and privacy policies and its a violation of FTC and IAB guidelines. Outbrain should know better considering the guy invented Quigo, a pure PPC advertising link business.