Last week Eytan Galai, brother of Yaron Galai (founder of Quigo, which was sold to AOL) came to our offices to show us all the lat­est that’s been hap­pen­ing with Out­brain. For those who don’t know, Out­brain has recently launched its rev­enue pro­gram Out­Loud.

For $10 a month, you can sub­mit an inter­est­ing arti­cle to Out­Loud. Out­brain will then take the arti­cles you sub­mit­ted — rang­ing from jour­nal­ism and blog entries to press releases for which you want to get more vis­i­bil­ity — and rec­om­mend them on rel­e­vant pages across thou­sands of sites using their con­tent rec­om­men­da­tion engine, rang­ing from USA Today, Slate, Fox and Tri­bune to Golf.com and the Sport­ingNews.

When I started ques­tion­ing the high monthly fee, Eytan insisted that I give him any two links I desire, which he will then put into the sys­tem and let me see the results for myself. Last Wednes­day I sent Out­brain the links, and they were put into the sys­tem on Fri­day. Once I acti­vated my account online I was able to get into the sec­tion called “Adver­tis­ing Report.” There I found and could fol­low ana­lyt­ics data such as num­ber of impres­sions and clicks for each link submitted.

From the start of our activ­ity until now, I must say that the num­ber of impres­sions has been quite high but the num­ber of clicks sig­nif­cantly lower than I expected it to be, based on the fact that the links were sup­posed to be directed at a spe­cific audi­ence who enjoyed sim­i­lar con­tent. As my friend Eze Vidra from VCCafe put it:

“In essence, Out­Loud pro­vides a cost-effective way to tar­get spon­sored arti­cles to organic con­tent on lead­ing pub­lisher sites and thou­sands of blogs. In com­par­i­son with ‘nor­mal’ PPC adver­tis­ing, Out­loud catches the users in a ‘read­ing mode’ rather than a ‘research­ing’ or ’shop­ping’ mode, which is often the case with SEM promotion.”

Please note that I was told by Out­brain on Sun­day that one of my links was not indexed prop­erly so I should be see­ing bet­ter results pretty soon. Today, Mon­day, I must say I do like the fact that there are no lim­i­ta­tions on how many impres­sions I can receive for each link submitted.

So who sub­mits links to Out­Loud? Accord­ing to Outbrain:

• The excited mar­keter want­ing to drive word-of-mouth by ampli­fy­ing pos­i­tive reviews and arti­cles about their company
• The proud blog­ger who wants their most bril­liant posts to reach a larger audience
• The inno­v­a­tive PR pro­fes­sional try­ing to find new ways to dis­trib­ute press releases and earned media
• The social media direc­tor, try­ing to build com­mu­nity by expos­ing larger audi­ences to a com­pany blog, or to con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing on other sites about their products
• The pas­sion­ate blog reader who fell in love with an arti­cle which per­fectly expresses her point-of-view and who wants to make sure oth­ers are exposed to it too

The pay­off for a subscription

The link(s) that are put in the Out­Loud sys­tem con­tin­u­ously receive more and more impres­sions. As Out­brain says on its blog:

“At $10, Out­Loud is really a no-brainer. If you ana­lyze the oppor­tu­nity for more than a few min­utes, you’ve already spent more than you would by just try­ing it. Imag­ine, thou­sands of peo­ple exposed to your cho­sen con­tent for less than the cost of a beet salad.”

While this is all true, and I think the idea itself is excel­lent, $10 is still quite a sub­stan­tial fee for which I still think I deserve a cool fea­ture like know­ing which spe­cific blogs my link appeared on and how many clicks it got in each blog.

Despite the lower than expected click through rate I am expe­ri­enc­ing at this point I am more than con­fi­dent in Outbrain’s capa­bil­ity to deliver at the end due to its strong team. Out­brain is turn­ing out to be an inno­v­a­tive thinker in find­ing ways to mon­e­tize itself and at the same time stick to its phi­los­o­phy of giv­ing more value to readers.

The ques­tion is: Will it be able to mon­e­tize and at the same time promise com­pletely rel­e­vant con­tent all the time? Time will tell. I have a lot of faith in these guys who I believe have gath­ered quite a sub­stan­tial amount of infor­ma­tion about blogs until now and will con­tinue to grow the num­ber of sites using their con­tent rec­om­men­da­tion engine. Such fac­tors will obvi­ously deter­mine the suc­cess of Out­Loud and its abil­ity to keep even paid links of top qual­ity and rel­e­vant to the con­tent at hand.Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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