What It Is
Dubbed “Sponsored But Good,” the program places sponsored links to articles selected by advertisers within the Outbrain widget. The concept is that as opposed to simply inserting a direct response ad like you might find in AdSense, you get a link to an interesting piece of content. For example, Palm might want to purchase a sponsored link to a favorable review of the Pre and have it display in the Outbrain widget on selected tech blogs. Here’s what it looks like:
Why OutBrain Thinks It Will Be Successful
Outbrain thinks this approach will work for a few reasons. For publishers and readers, it’s not much of a change to the existing widget, other than one of the links will happen to be sponsored (and is marked as such). For advertisers, Outbrain says, “in general the opinion of non-biased trusted sources holds considerable weight when evaluating a products and advertisers see our program as an ideal method to tap into the those powerful, trustworthy conversations in a non-intrusive way.”
Some Reasons It Might Not Be
There’s no doubt that Outbrain is right in assessing advertiser’s desire to drive consumers towards favorable and authentic reviews of their products – and their widget is as good a medium as any to try this approach. But from an advertiser’s perspective, it’s an investment in branding more than an investment in directly driving sales, and that’s a tricky thing at a time when ad budgets are already being cut.
Outbrain will also need to attract a significant number of advertisers in order to give this program the scale it needs to not only drive revenue, but ensure its publishers are seeing content worth sharing with their readers in the widget.
What do you think of Outbrain’s approach? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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