WebProNews

Tag: outbrain

  • Taboola – Outbrain Merger Falls Apart

    Taboola – Outbrain Merger Falls Apart

    It was a merger that started out nearly a year ago as a perfect idea and was even approved by the U.S. government. In the end, it turned into a perfect storm because of the ad industry upheaval caused by the coronavirus and subsequent business closures followed by massive unemployment and fewer clicks on ads. Ad prices then dropped dramatically which changed the value proposition for both Outbrain and Taboola.

    The world’s two leading companies in the discovery & native advertising industry will remain fierce competitors in what still is a chaotic and unpredictable ad market.

    “As part of the process we exchanged financial information with each other,” says Taboola Founder & CEO Adam Singolda in a blog post. “Based on the relative performance of the two companies, we decided the original deal does not make sense anymore. We could choose to pay the same price of 30% in equity + $250M, but our shareholders thought it’s too much for what we would get based on the relative contribution of the two companies. Nothing emotional, not about culture fit, just data.”

    “Out of deep respect, we tried to do a deal that was equity only (but less equity), or equity and cash (but less cash) that matched Outbrain’s financial contribution to Taboola. We failed, and we called it off.”

    Outbrain Co-Founder and CEO Yaron Galai expressed his own thoughts on the collapse of the merger:

    “It is now public news that Outbrain’s planned merger with Taboola is heading to termination in the near future. This isn’t the outcome any of us anticipated for this process. We believed when entering this deal that there is great potential value to be had for our employees, our marketers and publisher partners, and our shareholders. However, this combination apparently was simply not meant to be. We worked hard to mix water and oil, but ultimately the companies proved to be too different to be mixed.” 

    “During a very stormy year for the Outbrain team, due to both the pandemic and the cloud of the merger, Outbrain’s character as the #1 most trusted partner for the world’s best publishers has shone through very brightly. We’re excited to continue innovating and building the best native advertising products for publishers and marketers as an independent company for many years to come.”

     

  • Does Social Media Still Suck At Driving Traffic?

    Does Social Media Still Suck At Driving Traffic?

    About a month ago, a study came out discussing thle top drivers of traffic in relation to Internet traffic. While sites/companies like Google and Yahoo were about where you would expect, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook were lacking. In fact, the study, commissioned and performed by Outbrain, was responsible for a popular WebProNews article, one that, thanks to additional data from the aforementioned content company, questioned how well sites like Facebook and Twitter did in regards to driving web traffic to other sites.

    The results were surprising, especially when you read about how more and more people are getting their news from social media recommendations. Nevertheless, Outbrain’s findings were clear: Social media sucks at driving web traffic.

    Or does it?

    Earlier, we received an email from Outbrain and their findings have been adjusted to such a degree, the “sucks” descriptor in relation to social media is not as accurate as it once was. First, Outbrain’s findings:

    Top 20 Traffic Sources to Content Pages

    1 Google
    2 Yahoo
    3 AOL/Huffington Post
    4 Facebook
    5 MSN*
    6 Drudge Report
    7 CNN
    8 Outbrain
    9 StumbleUpon
    10 Twitter
    11 FoxNews.com
    12 reddit
    13 MediaTakeOut
    14 Fark
    15 Slate
    16 Comcast
    17 NewsNow.co.uk
    18 Wikipedia
    19 Digg
    20 Real Clear Politics

    *Includes Bing and Live.com

    In the previous report, Facebook was out of the top ten as a traffic source, and in the new findings, Facebook is now in the top five. That’s much more congruent with the realization many web users get their news, or at least recommendations for news, from Facebook.

    Oddly enough, however, is Twitter’s fall. In the previous report, Twitter was ranked in the top seven, and in the new data, Twitter has fallen to the tenth spot. Considering the increase of Twitter use, that may be surprising, but previous studies have shown Twitter is good at driving traffic to blogs and other social media outlets, but not so good when it comes to driving traffic to retail sites.

    Another area of surprise, or at least, perhaps mirth is Outbrain’s insistence on sticking themselves in these rankings. Again, the company responsible for the study is ranked eighth, which represents a drop of two places from the previous study. It should be noted that Outbrain makes content widgets, like the following:

    Outbrain Widget

    And these appear on a number of large news sites, including USAToday and The Chicago Tribune. This would help explain Outbrain’s traffic-driving prowess considerably.

    Then there’s the matter of Reddit.com. Considering Reddit’s explosive growth, which, oddly enough, coincides with Digg’s update failure, it’s surprising it ranks so low on Outbrain’s findings, new or previous. Reddit’s traffic driving prowess, according to Outbrain, ranked around the one percent mark. Google’s, on the other hand, ranks in the 32 percentile. Does this mean that all those Reddit members aren’t clicking links, or, much like the Twitter findings, is Reddit only good at driving traffic to certain kinds of sites?

    In the case of Reddit, the enthusiastic users have helped make Imgur a viable image bank, although, it’s doubtful they would do much in the way of having an impact on the traffic going to FoxNews.com, for instance.

    Do these new findings change your thoughts about using Facebook and Twitter for promotional content or do will you still shy away from them, choosing, instead, to focus on Google and Yahoo’s properties?

    Let us know what you think.

  • Content Discovery Trends

    Related link widget providers Outbrain have just released to their blog their first ever study of content discovery trends. How do people access content across the internet? While search still drives the majority of content discovery, social media is beginning to carve out its own chunk of the pie.

    Outbrain is the top content recommendation service on the web. You can see their related link widgets on popular sites like USA Today, Slate, Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Their study is an analysis of Q1 2011 statistics of traffic patterns from publishers that are using their platform. They analyzed over 100 million sessions, which they define as a series of page views with no more than 30 minutes between one and the next.

    They found that among traffic to content pages (articles and video), one-third of the sessions start from external sites. The other two-thirds come from directly accessing the site through type-ins, bookmarks and in-site links. So the data they analyzed comes from the 33% of sessions starting from external sites.

    What they found was that the top three sources of traffic to content pages were Google, AOL and Yahoo respectively.  Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter came in 4th and 8th, respectively.  Digg rounded out the top 20.

    In their breakdown of external sources for traffic, they found that search stills holds the largest chunk of the pie, at 41%.  Content sites linking to other content sites made up 31%.  Portal homepages accounted for 17% of directed traffic and social media sites hold 11%.

    Search leading the way in content discovery should come as no surprise.  The more interesting part of Outbrain’s study regards the types of information accessed via specific sources and “reader engagement” by category.

    What type of content is being accessed through social media sites?  Surprising or not, mostly news – 42% in fact.  The next two top areas are entertainment stories with 30% and articles about lifestyle at 13%.

    Reader engagement is highest when content is accessed through search or other content sites.  Engagement is lowest when people come from social media sites – and inversely, the bounce rate (only one page view) is highest from social sites.  Content sites have the lowest bounce rate, as Outbrain points out presumably because people accessing content via other content sites are already in content devouring mode.

    Hyper-engaged readers, or what they call reader who access 5 or more pages per session, is also highest from content sites and search.  As would be expected, readers coming in from social sites are not particularly hyper-engaged.

    One last little tidbit that I found interesting:

    Given the popularity of both Facebook and Twitter, we thought it was worth comparing their relative traffic quality to see what differences exist. Surprisingly, the two sites drive similarly engaged audiences in terms of page views per session, bounce rates and hyper-engaged reader sessions. The one key difference is in their relative reach, which we define as the number of unique visitors per 1,000 sessions. Specifically, we found about 72% of sessions originating from Facebook were from a unique visitor, versus only 52% in the case of Twitter, suggesting that Twitter’s audience is more likely to be made up of repeat visitors.

    So, social site referrals are growing, but it looks like the challenge moving forward will be how to engage those readers past one page view.  Obviously, a person jumping from content site to content site is in the mood to cram their brains with info – but people linked to a funny story via Facebook might not be in consumption mode.  They are probably just curious.  If these findings prove accurate, it will be especially important for news and entertainment companies to integrate fully into the social media sphere, as those are the types of stories most shared in that manner.