Outbrain Recommendations are Advertisements in Disguise
Outbrain, an embeddable rating and “recommendation” widget for your blog or website has found a place at the end of each of my posts. The guys behind Outbrain have been great; allowing me to try out new features and even helping me with formatting issues. I have been extremely happy with Outbrain and what they are offering until I noticed that the “recommendations” portion of the widget is not what it seems.
Before something drastically changed at Outbrain, the recommendations widget would show similar blogs at the end of your blog post. In exchange for putting the recommendations on your blog, you would expect to have your blog show up on other Outbrain users. This in theory would give you a little more traffic, but it’s not true anymore. The Outbrain recommendations now include more popular blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, but neither Engadget or Gizmodo have the recommendations widget on there site. (Where’s my part of the deal?)
So I am involuntarily putting free advertising on my blog without ANY chance of getting ANYTHING beneficial in return? Yep. Outbrain has either made an error (I hope) or worse they’ve been selling recommendations links. If they’ve done the latter, expect my use of the widget to cease. It’s too bad to see something like this happen and I’m hoping it’s a mistake.
I have currently turned off the recommendations portion of the widget until this conflict is cleared up.
Readers, what do you think about Outbrain’s new recommendation/advertising widget?
Update: An explanation post.
June 28th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Loren hi – I’m the CEO of Outbrain.
1st – you can easily control the behavior of our recommendtions through the outbrain control panel. You can choose to have recommendations stay strictly within your site and never send a link out. Please note that even when you choose this option, your posts will still show up elsewhere on our network when they are relevant.
2nd – We do not promote any sites in any way within the recommendations. The links we provide are purely a result of the algorithms we’ve developed. We constantly test improvements, but as with any algorithm – results can sometimes seem weird. The case above seems like a result for a recent algorithm enhancement we’ve been testing where we try to find contextually relevant links to compliment our recommendations (I assume this showed up on a post discussing the MacBook?).
In fact, all 3 sites in those recommendations (Engadget, Gizmodo and TUWA) are *not* carrying our widget and we have no relationship with them. We have no interest in showing them, other than the fact that our algorithm thought those are the best ‘related’ links from trusted sources to show on your post.
I hope this clarification helps. We constantly strive to give your readers the best possible recommendations. I appologize if this seemed like a glitch. Again – while I wouldn’t encourage it, feel free to limit the recommendations to your site only.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:13 pm
[...] post is an update to a previous post about Outbrain’s recommendation [...]