Publisher Customer Story: Outbrain Is On The Content Marketing Menu For India’s Sanjeev Kapoor

These days, as online banner ads have become one of the least trusted advertising mediums, publishers across the globe have been motivated to leverage a variety of different formats and opportunities for increasing their revenue online.

With that, the evolution and popularization of content marketing have since rooted itself as a common practice in many areas of the world. Now, finally gaining momentum in India, key publishers are starting to generate sizeable profits.

How?

From the strategic use of high-quality content to deliver value, paired with content distribution platforms like Outbrain to drive engaged traffic.

A Use Case for Content in India

As Director of Business Development for Outbrain India, I’ve spent years working closely with publishers and have come to the conclusion that their goals can be summarized as:

• Generating Higher Revenue
• Increasing User Engagement

One such example comes from a premium Indian publisher in our network, Sanjeevkapoor.com.

But first, let me give you some background.

Sanjeev Kapoor is the most celebrated face of Indian cuisine today.

His portal is a complete cookery manual with a compendium of more than 9,000 recipes, plus, a wealth of information on the art and craft of cooking.

Very popular amongst Indians as well as NRIs (non-resident Indians, i.e. Indians living overseas) who get homesick for Indian food, the website has generated half a million registered users and an average of 10 million page views per month!

It has been awarded as the “Most Popular Website,” and “Best Website of the Year” for 2 consecutive years in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

The Growth Challenge

Since its launch in 1997, Sanjeevkapoor.com has seen year-over-year growth in its organic traffic.

Content has resonated well with their current audience, but they were interested in finding a way to increase overall reader engagement while driving more quality traffic to some of their amazing content offerings.

Typically implemented were display and text-based advertising campaigns as a means of primary revenue generation.

This time, Sanjeevkapoor.com wanted to test a new content monetization method without compromising on user experience.

An Outbrain Solution

So, they partnered with Outbrain to power internal recommendation technology with paid links to 3rd party content.

Because you know what people do trust?

Recommendations.

Tackling the two important goals noted earlier, Outbrain overcame the following challenges via strategic content campaigns:

1) Generating Higher Revenue:

Most display ad platforms utilized by publishers generally ask for space on the first scroll.

That being said, publishers are constantly looking for alternative options to generate revenue from the bottom scroll in order to ensure an optimized experience on their content pages.

Content recommendations work best when placed right below articles and produce the highest RPM’s (revenue per thousand impressions).

Therefore, this ensured SanjeevKapoor.com would gain the highest ROI from their bottom scroll space.

Our Solution:

Once SanjeevKapoor.com installed the Outbrain Engage content recommendation module, they began seeing immediate results.

The module, which contained relevant links from external recommendations, enhanced their audience’s content journey through across the web, resulting in 20% of overall online revenue.

2) Increasing User Engagement:

As social media has become a cultural way of life, especially with how audiences consume content, engagement has become a key metric for publishers to evaluate.

However, their challenge has often been finding the right tools to leverage engagement and properly investing in the utilization of those tools.

Our Solution: 

Drawing on Outbrain’s integrated, personalized, and relevant internal recommendations, SanjeevKapoor.com was able to surface the most interesting and engaging owned content for readers to consume.

Through organic recommendations, article after article and page view after page view rose.

After testing the widget on Sanjeevkapoor.com, we immediately saw users engaging with a variety of content, leading to an overall growth in CTR of 3.5%.

If you’re a publisher and want to know more about how you can grow your total revenue streams together by connecting the content stack with the ad stack, fill out our contact form and the right person will be in touch as soon as possible.