r3fresh

r3fresh and Outbrain: We’re All Good

This post is an update to a previous post about Outbrain’s recommendation system.

Previously, I had come to the conclusion that Outbrain had been (unknowingly) selling links in their recommendation widget. After talking to the Outbrain guys, this is (fortunately) false. The Outbrain widget is the first recommendation widget of it’s kind and goes against most web 2.0 practices. The recommendations widget finds the best posts on the entire Internet and puts them on your site. With alternative recommendation engines you would only have recommended posts from users using the same service, which may lower the quality of recommendations on your site.

Outbrain is the first web company that isn’t greedy with their service. They don’t have any advertising in their widget, anyone can use the service, and recommendations come from everywhere, not just from bloggers using the widget.

After this experience I wanted to publicly apologize for my outburst towards Outbrain. I should have contacted them before posting anything on the Internet. Outbrain is different and every blogger should give their service a try.

Vist Outbrain

Picture by Macwagen

Tags: apology, outbrain, rating, recommendation, thanks

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.

Tags: advertising, blog, outbrain, plugin, problem, widget