• by Sara Guaglione , March 3, 2016

Outbrain, a content discovery platform, today announced that through its acquisition of technology company Revee, it has launched Automatic Yield, a content recommendation solution that enables publishers to monetize audiences with a real-time understanding of content.

According to a statement, for the first time, Outbrain's Automatic Yield allows publishers to measure exactly how much individual articles are generating in revenue in real-time.

The Outbrain Automatic Yield product integrates Revee's technology and hooks up with publishers' ad servers to provide data on which articles are earning the most money.

Time Inc. is the first partner to implement Outbrain Automatic Yield and will roll out across Fortune and Entertainment Weekly.

"With the rise of social platforms and more prevalent ad blocking, publishers' core business is under fire," stated Outbrain CEO, Yaron Galai.

Outbrain’s new product claims to solve one of the “core problems” digital publishers face: how to connect content programming and revenue delivery with a single piece of technology.

Digital publishers didn’t have this technology before Outbrain Automatic Yield, Matt Crenshaw, vice president of product marketing at Outbrain, told Publishers Daily in an email.

“Every publisher is in the business of creating and distributing content to make money, but how exactly those two things connect has always been fuzzy. Editorial teams and ad operations teams work across different systems that don't talk to one another,” Crenshaw said.

Publishers also needed a way to act on that data.

“Even if they know that a certain page is worth more than another, how do they make use of that insight?” he said.

Outbrain is hoping publishers will see this product as a way to bring in audiences, by placing ads for their highest-performing content on other sites.

“We are plugging these new, real-time page revenue analytics into our recommendation engine to automatically drive interested audiences to the pages on a publisher's site that are worth the most,” Crenshaw said.

For example, he said the revenue value of a single piece of content can fluctuate by as much as 262% in a single day, “given all of the various types of ads that a publisher is running.”

“By injecting these real-time page revenue calculations into our content recommendation engine, we can help the publisher deliver revenue much more efficiently. What this means is higher revenues per user while also delivering the best personalized content to each user,” he said.

Crenshaw explained that user preferences and publisher revenues “no longer can be treated as separate factors.”

According to Galai, Outbrain’s acquisition of Revee is “indicative” of the platform's desire to serve “both the demands of audiences and the publisher's larger revenue needs in real-time."

Outbrain is looking to expand Automatic Yield beyond the U.S. and will roll out across the United Kingdom, Israel and France in the coming weeks. Outbrain has also been beta-testing with FoxNews, FoxBusiness and Rodale.

Revee was co-founded in August 2013 by Nic Paul and Cham Kim, who worked together at Penske Media.