[Infowarrior] - Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

[Richard Forno]

(this is looooong overdue.  --rick)

Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads

Sapna Maheshwari and John Herrman

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/business/media/publishers-rethink-outbrain-taboola-ads.html

Such is the disconnect between the content ad industry’s expressed hopes for what it wants to provide and what internet users end up seeing.

“The vision is to index the entire web and bring the best, most personalized stuff to people,” Adam Singolda, Taboola’s founder and chief executive, said in an interview. “For the most part, a lot of the value Taboola brings is to introduce you to things people may not even know about but like.” He listed examples like new TV shows, blogs and even music from Brooklyn D.J.s.

Outbrain, which also creates tools for publishers to direct readers to other parts of their own websites, says its mission is to “help people discover content that they can trust to be interesting, relevant and timely for them.”

Matt Crenshaw, vice president of product marketing at Outbrain, said, “As this space has grown up, this is becoming a very significant percentage-wise revenue source for publishers.”

“We have been told from major, major publishers that we have become their No. 1 revenue provider,” he said, declining to name specific companies.

Outbrain and Taboola both say they offer tools for publishers to remove potentially problematic content. Additionally, the companies employ teams of people who vet content before it is introduced onto their networks, though they admitted it was a challenge to police those who alter campaigns and redirect URLs after approval. And then there’s the problem of sheer scale.

Outbrain, which says it serves 200 billion recommendations a month, employs a “fairly large content editorial team that’s about 17 to 20 people,” said Eric Hadley, Outbrain’s head of marketing. (The company also said that its partnership with Slate, which began in 2010, did not end because of a poor reader experience, though it declined to elaborate.) Taboola, which claims it provides 360 billion recommendations a month, has about 100 account managers who approve new ads, as well as 10 employees dedicated to “keeping content clean,” Mr. Singolda said.

Financial details for the companies are not public, though notable deals shed some light on the industry’s size. Taboola signed a three-year deal with Gannett last year that Mr. Singolda estimated could bring inasmuch as $55 million for the publisher. Time Inc., which owns People, Fortune and other magazines, said in 2014 that its three-year partnership with Outbrain would generate more than $100 million in revenue. Outbrain says it accounts for up to 30 percent of revenue for some publishers.

“We have been consistently pleased with Outbrain as a third-party provider of content recommendations for our site visitors,” Jill Davison, a spokeswoman for Time, said in an email.


Sometimes, the links from these ads can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities. Sometimes the information they present is false.
A sample of six Outbrain recommendations on The New Yorker’s website on Oct. 5 showed the confusion readers may face when looking at content ads; several were legitimate, but one led to a spamlike “clickbait” site and another led to a fake health news site created by a marketing company.

Two led to editorial stories from AARP, which promotes its website through Outbrain and embeds the widgets on its own site.

“We no longer need to go out and create relationships with each individual publisher,” said Nataki Edwards, AARP’s senior vice president for digital marketing. But she acknowledged that quality control was an issue.

“Outbrain and Taboola and others — they’ve relaxed their standards over the last few years,” Ms. Edwards said. “Our users, they think we’ve vetted all these things. We want to make sure we uphold their trust.”

Asked about the widget and about specific ads, Nicholas Thompson, the editor of NewYorker.com, said, “Outbrain only appears on our humor pages. That’s a deliberate choice.” He added that the arrangement was part of a deal between The New Yorker’s parent company, Condé Nast, and Outbrain. Within a week of the interview, The New Yorker had removed the ads from its site, though it declined to comment on its decision.

For Slate, it was worth it to stop supporting the ads, Mr. Hernandez said. The publisher’s top priority is figuring out how to turn the casual visitor into a regular reader who stops by the site eight to 24 times a week, he said.

“When you’re looking at things from that prism and you’re not maniacally obsessed with monetizing every single pixel, Outbrain is very obviously not fitting into your equation anymore,” he said. “If your readers’ trust and loyalty is No. 1 as the thing you care about most, you can’t have that on your page.”

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It's better to burn out than fade away.