What is OutLoud?
OutLoud is a way for publishers to promote an article/piece of content and have it appear inside the Outbrain widget on pages across the large Outbrain network.

How does it work?
A publisher who would like to promote an article would pay $10 per month per article s/he would like to “amplify”. OutLoud targets articles by relevancy and audience engagement — when it thinks someone will be interested in a promoted article (because they are reading something similar), Outbrain shows a link inside their widget. Articles that people seem to enjoy more get an audience lift. Because of this focus on reader interest, there are no traffic guarantees with OutLoud, but there also isn’t a limit to how much exposure you could receive. The more interesting the article, the more successful it is in drawing a large audience.

Comparison to other CPC based programs
Although not positioned this way, OutLoud seems to me as an attempt to get into the multi-Billion-dollar text ads marketplace that has been dominated by programs such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing (btw, you can use this link to sign up and get a $25 credit for Yahoo Search Marketing). Even if Outbrain does not want to position the new product as competition to these advertising programs, the publishers/advertisers who will sign up for Outloud will do that as they would like to find how this traffic aquisition program performs compared to other programs they use. Based on Outbrain’s post, an average article will drive 50 to 100 readers a month which translates to $0.10-$0.20 CPC ($10 per months / 100 or 50). To me this range seems to be at the low end of Google’s average CPC rate for many keywords in many categories, and therefore worth the test.

Pros:

• Introducing a subscription based model in an industry that for the past 11 years (since Bill Gross invented CPC and founded Goto.com/Overture) has been using cost-per-click text ads is innovative, unique and very interesting. I give the Outbrain team great credit for introducing this model into such an established industry. Their challenge would be to get advertisers who are so used to working in a certain format to adopt a new one.

• AdWords or Yahoo’s search marketing consoles have become pretty complicated and require you to create campaigns, ad groups, ads, manage keywords, bids and placements, not to mention the different optimization techniques you have to use constantly. Outbrain is on the other side of the spectrum. Its approach is super simple which makes it very easy and attractive for a non-techie publisher/blogger to get started. Simply sign-in into Outbrain self service system, add url(s) to amplify and check out. Felt like “AdWords for Dummies” to me.

Cons:

• Favoring relevant content by giving it more impressions sounds similar to Google’s Landing Page Quality Score (LPQS) that influencing a keyword’s minimum bids, ad ranking and actual CPC. This vague concept allows Outbrain not to commit to a certain # of impressions a link to an article gets for the $10-per month rate. To be honest, I am having mixed feelings about using a black box approach, especially when it is done by a company and product that I like. As an advertiser, I want to have as much info as possible about how, where and when my money is spent. As a Google AdWords & Yahoo advertiser (I manage a campaign for my wife’s birth doula business) I have too many unanswered questions about keywords, quality scores, min bids, etc. that I can not get answers from Google nor from Yahoo.
• Publishers who have been using OpenID to sign into the Outbrain dashboard can not checkout and pay (due to security issues related to OpenID). According to the dashboard they should contact Outbrain for a solution. I hope this limitation get addressed soon.

Wish list
[If this feature is already in place then well done Outbrain team. If it does not work this way, then here's my first and most important feature request]

I don’t want my campaigns to be like the gym membership that people forgot to cancel. I hope that Outbrain has implemented subscription based services based practices and that it sends an email a few days before the renewal date with a reminder about the upcoming renewal and with some data on the past month’s performance. If their service works well and delivers viewers to my content there is  no reason I would cancel it.

Bottom line
An interesting concept, easy of use, affordable pricing and a product that I like very much as a blogger. I am going to give it a shot and try OutLoud to drive some traffic to my wife’s birthspeak.com website and compare how it performs compared to the Google and Yahoo campaigns I am currently running.

To read more about Outloud, check out the official post here.

P.S.
Two last notes unrelated to OutLoud but very related to Outbrain:

1. A few weeks ago I was walking the exhibit hall at BlogWorld Las Vegas and looking for Outbrain’s booth in order to say hello to the team. I kept walking and walking, looking for a booth that has the 5 starts logo I know so well but I just could not find it. Eventually, after looking at the floor map and navigating my way according to it, I found the Outbrain booth and immediately shared my thoughts on the new logo via twitter. Well, based on the current logo on Outbrain’s website it looks like someone has put a pause on this rebrand process. And if I had something to do with it, then I am glad I could help. But right before publishing this post I read Eze’s post on VC Cafe and saw the new logo which makes me puzzled again (Yaron, I said it once and will say it again – why Mii?).

2. Looks like Outbrain is now testing/migrating to showing images that are scraped off of the destination pages inside the widget . Smart move to increase CTR on links especially if you are an OutLoud advertiser.

Today I discovered another hidden feature that I was not aware of – suggestion of the right spelling for a query that contains a misspelling. For example, start typing the the query “waist of t” and Google will suggest terms such as “waste of time” or “waste of space”. Pretty cool as it saves you the extra “Did you mean?” search.

By the way, when comparing this feature of Google Suggest to the other search engines, I would rank them in the following order:

1. Google – variety of offers and misspelling correction
2. Ask – misspelling correction but small variety of suggestions
3. Yahoo – strong bias towards suggesting misspelling
4. Bing – No variety, no misspelling correction. Still needs to do major improvements in that area.

I wonder if that is a response to the fact Microsoft AdCenter came out of beta recently or to the Bing launch, a search engine that I highly recommend using.

BTW, does anyone know if (and how much) Google pays publishers when visitors clicks on these house ads and take action (download picasa or chrome, sign up for analytics or as advertisers)?

google-house-ad-adwords

So what do you think was the CTR on this text link and what was Gmail’s sign up process conversation rate for those that were brave enough to click?

I saw it on QuickGold which is an app (great one – the Quicksilver version for iPhone) that can be installed only on a jailbroken iPhone.

This makes me wonder, does Google, a long time Apple partner, advertise on semi-illigal applications? Or is that a RON type of buy?

I wonder if that’s a way for Google to boost holiday sales grabbing people’s attention and pointing them to the sponsored results rail on the right.

Menorah (kw=Hanukkah)

Candy cane (kw=Christmas)

Candy cane (kw=Kawanzaa gifts)

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

I took a screenshot of my Google Analytics account and compared the results to ComScore’s report. During the month of May 2008, 96% (!) of the search users who came to this blog were Google users.

And yes, the numbers are small, they do not represent the US population and not statistically significant, but still, I find Google’s dominance among the readers of this blog to be really amazing.

This made me thinking about the economics of the “Featured” page and the Search results pages. After all, VC are investing and companies are raising money to develop iPhone applications and so distribution is going to be critical to succeed. So far, everyone has expected Apple to be the one selling applications via iTunes but I think that there is a secondary market that is already bubbling called the Nullriver Installer.

The thing with the Installer that makes it unique compared to popular software download web sites is that currently the Installer is the single entry point to get 3rd party applications for iPhone and iPod Touch. Hundreds of thousand and maybe even millions of jailbreaked iPhone users around the world access the Installer every day in order to search, install, upgrade or uninstall applications, games, utilities, themes and all kinds of tweaks for their iPhone. Every time these users start the Installer, the first thing they see is the list of featured applications, and from today they are also going to start using the search capabilities.

So, what should a company/developer do in order to get his app featured? I did some research but could not find an answer. So, for now, I am assuming that the list is compiled by an editor with some exceptions (my guess – Kate which charges users and therefore can pay for distribution). The search function is also very primitive and seems broken (a search for “Wiki” returned zero results).

But I think that this is just the first step in what is going to become an active marketplace (probably PPI – Pay Per Install) that is going to be developed around the Installer. Both the “Featured” page and the search result pages are too valuable to be kept as they are today. And seeing how fast the Installer has evolved so far, I expect this to happen sooner than you expect.

I know it has been written in every basic SEO guide but I will repeat it again for those who might have forgotten. You can always use a "professional SEO software" that will do a lot of the work for you, or you can simply remember to set ALT text and a meaningful file name for images you post. That itself will do a lot.