6 Strategies for Building Revenue Streams with Outbrain

As a publisher, finding new and sustainable ways to monetize your pages is more important now than ever before. Against the backdrop of continued pressure by the Facebook and Google duopoly, and the increased desire of audiences to have access to trusted editorial environments, publishers must find innovative ways to drive revenue while keeping the user experience and engagement as their top priority.

With that in mind, here are 6 ways publishers can leverage Outbrain’s technology to deliver a great user experience while maximizing the vital revenue streams required to keep quality journalism alive.

Thoughtfully monetize your newsletters

With 99% of people checking their email accounts daily, newsletters are an untapped source of revenue. Newsletters form a central part of many of our partners’ subscription and audience retention strategy, but they can also be a valuable monetization stream. 

Outbrain’s Newsletter solution enables publishers to extend native ad monetization directly into their newsletter services to help grow direct revenues via non-intrusive native advertising formats. You’ll have access to the full spectrum of Outbrain’s premium demand; and integration into your existing newsletter is simple thanks to a standard HTML tag. 

Consider In-Article placements

Outbrain’s In-Article placements provide incremental revenue opportunities via highly-viewable, rich ad formats. Since audiences engage differently with content (ie. skim readers vs. detailed readers), it’s important to ensure advertising is placed and presented strategically, but sympathetically, throughout a reader’s journey. 

These highly engaging placements fight banner blindness with non-interruptive advertising formats driven by consumers’ true interests. In-article placements can provide additional revenue uplift when utilised alongside other Outbrain formats. They can even be leveraged to distribute and drive your own revenue diversification initiatives. 

Adapt your monetization strategy for live ticker and breaking news pages

Breaking news, live ticker pages, and lengthy editorial pieces have long presented a monetization challenge for publishers given the difficulties in ensuring ad placement viewability. Our Read More feature shortens long articles or pages, allowing ads to appear higher up the page and increasing monetization from audiences who are just looking for the most recent update on a developing news story. Audiences simply press the button to access the full page. The Outbrain Read More button dramatically increases RPMs while maintaining a great user experience. This feature can be activated without any additional development work.

Use Outbrain placements to drive engagement with your own revenue driving initiatives 

Outbrain’s Audience Campaigns is a self-service tool that helps publishers deliver the right content to the right audience, offering the best personalized content experience. It provides a sophisticated solution to flight selected content, thereby empowering publishers to drive engagement with their own revenue diversification efforts. Audience Campaigns are leveraged by publishers across the Outbrain network to serve their own content to audiences within Outbrain placements, in support of driving Newsletter subscribers, increasing engagement with branded content, promoting subscriptions packages and effectively leveraging their own eCommerce activity. 

Extend Native Discovery to include Outstream Video formats

Publishers typically struggle with video due to lean inventory that is primarily limited to in-stream or pre-roll formats, forcing them to sacrifice the user experience to monetize. Outbrain’s Native Outstream Video, however, offers highly-engaging formats powered by premium inventory at scale served seamlessly within Outbrain placements. These formats form a complementary element to the Discovery experience, and ensure a quality user experience with features such as user-initiated sound. As a result of increased audience engagement, publishers see an average RPM increase of 40% when including Outstream video.

Measure, Monitor, Optimize

As our publishers continue to see fluctuations in site traffic and shifting audience engagement patterns, we have recently added several new insights features to provide our publishers with the tools they need. 

Group reporting: Publishers who represent multiple titles or a portfolio of properties can now easily see a group level view within the Outbrain Dashboard Performance report. This ensures they are able to drill down on a site level or zoom out to a group view, making it easier to monitor and analyze revenues.

Historical data timeline: Easily compare performance data via a historic timeline on both the graph and grid view within the Performance Report found on the Engage Dashboard. This feature can be used to easily view the performance metric selected and compare it either to the previous period you have selected or the same time period in the previous year. 

While 2020 continues to present challenges for the publishing industry, Outbrain’s Native Advertising offers our partners countless opportunities to drive monetization without sacrificing audience experience. For more details, or to get started with any of the above, reach out to your Outbrain team at infouk@outbrain.com.

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