Time Inc. struck a deal worth $100 million with Outbrain making the company the exclusive external provider of recommended stories for Time Inc.'s websites. Time Inc. has worked with various companies whose content-recommendation widgets help push traffic around the web.
Outbrain is a content recommendation company that puts links beneath articles published across a variety of websites, including CNN.com, Slate and ESPN. Media companies and marketers pay Outbrain to place links on various publisher sites in order to drive traffic to their content. Outbrain shares revenue from the links with the publisher sites.
Andy Blau, senior VP and group GM of ad sales at Time Inc. said of the deal: "We selected Outbrain not only because the revenues were higher than others but because its engine drives better recommendations than others."
In exchange for exclusivity with Outbrain, Time Inc. will receive more than $100 million in revenue-sharing over the course of the deal, according to Mr. Blau. The length of the agreement hasn't been disclosed, however, a person familiar with the deal said the arrangement will last three years.
In addition to driving readers to other websites, media companies also use Outbrain and its competitors to drive traffic to articles on their sites or within their own network of sites. For example, Time Inc., which owns People.com, could use Outbrain to drive traffic from Time.com to People.com. This can help the company's sites fulfill traffic guarantees to advertisers.
The deal with Outbrain covers Time Inc.'s entire global network of websites. Recommended stories from Outbrain will also appear on Time's mobile sites. Unique visitors across desktop and mobile devices to all of Time Inc.'s U.S. properties was 88.3 million in October, according to ComScore.
"This is one of the largest deals in Outbrain's history," said Tom Foran, Outbrain's chief revenue officer.
The content-recommendation space has become increasingly competitive over the last year with Outbrain, Taboola, and Yahoo competing for business. One of the most important aspects of success is how well recommended articles work with the content being read and how interesting the recommended articles are. Outbrain has therefore purged some companies from its customer base, however, the company has stated that when it comes to reader preferences, there is such a wide range, they try to cater to many different types of readers.
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