• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, March 23, 2017

Content discovery platform Outbrain on Wednesday launched a patent-pending tool it calls Automatic Yield, which aims to offer publishers proprietary insights into all aspects of their revenue picture. It marries real-time revenue value with the owned content a publisher circulates throughout its site.

The company worked with eight publishers on the beta test for Automatic Yield, including Penske Media Corp., Independent Journal Review, The Daily Caller, and Singapore Press Holdings. It declined to reveal the others, but said the beta publishers -- which will continue using the product -- have seen up to a 110% lift in incremental revenue from using the tool, with limited tradeoff between revenue and click-through rates.

In addition, the tool aims to address the inefficiencies in how publishers deliver revenue. For example, Outbrain said that ads are sold and flighted against content, content is produced and served but publishers shoulder the costs of sales teams, ad ops, and content production and then deliver only 60% of a campaign.

Also, it said that publishers’ content product, promotion, ad selling and ad flighting typically live in separate silos managed by several teams.

Matt Crenshaw, head of global distribution, Outbrain, said the tool also tries to help publishers with content syndication decisions: “By understanding the revenue value of the content on their sites, they can determine what’s worth syndicating on places like Facebook.

"Content syndication decisions are now being based on user engagement, but every decision a publisher makes needs to be made with revenue and growth in mind,” Crenshaw said.

“Automatic Yield solves one of the core problems digital publishers have faced from the beginning: how to connect content programming and revenue delivery with a single piece of technology,” stated Yaron Galai, co-founder & CEO, Outbrain.

Outbrain said media companies typically rely on many different partners and ad types to drive revenues but they don’t have a real understanding of how much money they make on each piece of content, each user, each monetization partner and traffic referral source.

Outbrain said its new tool ties all these pieces together into one report via a single dashboard.