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 anyone who doesn’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 and recommend them on relevant pages across the thousands of sites using their content recommendation engine, 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 # 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 significantly 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’s 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 Link/s that are put in the OutLoud system continuously receive more and more impressions. As Outbrain say on their 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.

The sweet, calming voice and gentle, nerdy humor of NPR radio is like home to me, like it is to a lot of people. I remember those comfy moments, driving around and listening to ‘All Things Considered.’ I’m guessing it’s the same way kids felt in the 50′s when their favorite radio personalities graced the airwaves.

NPR know how to tell a story, and tell it well, so it is no surprise that they are using their information-sharing savyness to penetrate online media, and are rising to the top doing it. They are one of the only news organizations that experienced a substantial growth in the last ten years as compared to their competitors who have seen a decline.

They are not afraid of digital media and this is what puts them ahead of the game. Here are 5 avenues NPR is taking to achieve success:

1) Facebook – NPR opened a Facebook page and has almost 400,000 fans. They also created an NPR podcast player application for facebook so you can listen to your favorite NPR stories right from your profile, as well as email favorites to your friends.

2) Twitter – Follow NPR news updates via twitter. You can choose to follow NPRNews, which has over 80,000 followers and/or NPRPolitics, which has approx. 700,000 followers.

3) iTunes – You can easily download their podcasts on iTunes. NPR update these 3 times a week and they are already getting about 1 million downloads per month. They also consistently appear on iTunes Top 10 list.

4) Blog – They have created a variety of separate blogs dedicated solely to subjects such as money, talk and news. These blogs are updated 3 times a week.

5) Open platform – Like a lot of online news sites, you can get by-the-hour updates on pretty much whatever you desire, whether it’s music, news, books, or science. But NPR introduced something new. They created an open platform, which enables their readers to create their own, personal podcasts and fool around with NPR content.

Kudos to NPR being ahead of the curve, there are a lot of other media companies that could learn from their example.

Image credit: Mr T in DC