PHOENIX — Since founding in 2006, Outbrain has built up to serving 200bn content recommendations on publisher sites every month, most as suggestions at the bottom of online articles. Now it wants use some of that breadth to improve the relevance of those recommendations.
“As publishers get smarter in content recommendation, we’re able to better understand the business needs of publishers… and provide signals to our algorithm,” according to Outbrain global marketing VP Lisa LaCour.
“We’re helping our brand marketers get smarter and smarter about what kinds of content they should be producing based on what we’re seeing audiences click on and actually engage in.”
LaCour says Outbrain doesn’t just want to serve up bottom-of-the-page links – it is increasingly used to help publishers program their editorial index pages, too.
Recent unconfirmed reports claim that Outbrain plans to go public in New York with a valuation of $1bn. Rival Taboola recently raised $117mn in new funding, also reported to be a “pre-IPO” step.
We interviewed her earlier this week at the IAB Leadership Meeting.