Celebrating Another Big Milestone for Outbrain in Australia

In January 2013, Outbrain officially launched its office in Sydney with a mission to power content discovery for publishers and brands in Australia and New Zealand. Fast forward into 2015, and from those humble beginnings, we’ve grown into an industry giant, powering an incredible one billion pages in Australia per month.

This huge milestone follows recent partnerships with market leaders such as News Corp Australia and The Guardian Australia. These publishers and many others, in Australia and across the world, are now rolling out Outbrain to power content discovery on home pages, section fronts and mobile apps, and it’s fantastic to see the ecosystem growing so quickly.

The key to our success is trust. After 3 years in the Australian market, audiences have learned to trust the content we serve, brands know we can drive interested audiences to their content, and publishers know we are a significant revenue stream for their business.

Growing Reach

These are indeed exciting times for Outbrain Australia. Our growth has been consistent and rapid. The audience reach on our network is simply massive – it means that practically, when a person from Australia is engaging with content, whether on desktop or on mobile devices, they are most likely on our network.

Back in September, comScore validated the Outbrain reach at 75% of the Australian digital population with 12M monthly Unique Visitors: that’s just on desktop (comScore only analyses desktop users), but our reach is even higher if we include mobile.

And with the recent partnerships, these figures are set to rise even further.

Beyond the Footer

But Outbrain’s journey is not just about the growth of the business or the audience; we have also been at the forefront of digital technology that is set to transform the way people interact with content. Outbrain started as a simple widget powering those content recommendations that sit at the bottom of articles. Over the years however, we have expanded our technology into a multifaceted platform to pioneer a new era of digital publishing.

In recent months, Australian publishers started leveraging our technology to power content recommendations on right rails, home pages, section fronts and mobile apps – we moved from ‘discover at the bottom of the page’, to ‘discover anywhere’ mode. This creates really interesting opportunities for brands and publishers alike to engage audiences with content wherever they are.

Reader-First Content Ecosystem

As the ecosystem grows, so does the interest from brands and media agencies. Earlier this year, Outbrain Australia established partnerships with Dentsu-Aegis, OMD and others to help media agencies drive content marketing ROI for clients.

It’s a classic chicken and egg – the stronger the ecosystem is, the more efficient it becomes for brands. The more brands invest in Outbrain, the higher publishers revenues get and roll us out to new placements. We now work with almost all of the leading brands in Australia. But what I am particularly proud of, is that we established Australia’s largest content marketplace that is open, transparent and independent. Everything we do is with an aim to help readers discover great content.