Outbrain is doubling down on its pivot to video – and its pivot to courting brand budgets.
The company is unveiling a new TikTok-inspired vertical video feed for publisher mobile sites that will appear at the bottom of articles. The new solution, called Moments by Outbrain, is currently in beta. Axel Springer and Fortune are among the publishers piloting the format.
The idea behind Moments is to bring the social media-style vertical video format out of the walled gardens and to open web publishers, said Outbrain CEO David Kostman.
Publishers can increase the time audiences spend with them and reuse the assets they already created for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, Kostman added.
Nearly 40% watched at least three Moments videos after reading articles on mobile, and 10% watched at least 10 videos, according to Outbrain’s early tests of the product. And, in a study conducted in August by audience research firm MediaScience involving a panel of 600 users, those who saw interstitial video ads when watching Moments content had 56% higher brand recall than those who saw display ads.
Video player
Similar to Outbrain’s native content widget, the Moments video player appears after a user has scrolled to the end of an article they’re reading. However, rather than being a native widget, Moments is a full-screen takeover that isolates the viewer’s attention on the vertical video feed. And, for publishers that adopt it for their mobile sites, the Moments player will replace Outbrain’s native content widget entirely.
All of the video content featured in the Moments player is sourced from the publisher site; it will not feature any content drawn from other publishers or user-generated social content. Publisher content featured in the video feed will also include a clickable link to a related story.
This format gives publishers control over the content shown on their sites, Kostman said, and it also lets them promote their own content to further spur increased user engagement. Publishers also receive a share of the ad revenue from interstitial ads.
Moments joins Outbrain’s other video-focused offering, Onyx, an ad product designed for brand advertisers, in contrast to Outbrain’s original text-based recommendation widgets. But, while Onyx only features ads, Moments will feature both publisher content and ads.
Outbrain is still tweaking the Moments ad experience, but, currently, one paid video plays after every two organic videos, a company spokesperson said.
Direct sales and programmatic plans
For now, Outbrain is selling Moments ad inventory directly on behalf of publishers as a managed service.
Outbrain is also working with the IAB on how to sell Moments through programmatic open auction. One hurdle to selling the Moments inventory programmatically is nailing down exactly how to classify the inventory according to the IAB Tech Lab’s new video ad standards for instream video.
When the Moments player goes into fullscreen takeover mode, with the sound on and playback initiated by the user, it could be considered instream, said Robert Blanck, general manager of ecommerce and advertising for Axel Springer, which has been testing the solution on its Germany-based Bild news site since August. However, in some cases, such as when the video is muted, the Moments player could fall into the accompanying content bucket, he said.
But platforms often sell social video under their own classifications without adhering to the Tech Lab’s standards, he added. So the standards could already be outdated when it comes to publisher ad products like Moments that mimic popular social video formats, he said.
Publisher control
Programmatic wrinkles aside, Blanck sees Moments as providing publishers more control over their video content and how to monetize it than they would get working with walled garden platforms.
Axel Springer has been creating vertical video for YouTube for some time, Blanck said. But it recently began exploring developing its own video player to keep users engaged with its content on its sites without relying on YouTube for hosting.
Axel Springer has partnered with Outbrain for the past three years. When the opportunity arose to test Moments, Axel Springer saw a chance to take the reins on its video experience without making a heavy tech investment.
“We want to be in the driver’s seat with a publisher-friendly company,” Blanck said. Plus, relying on Outbrain’s solution removed the need for Axel Springer to court its own demand. “Outbrain has more network effect power than a single publisher,” he said.
Outbrain has also proven to be more willing to share data and insights derived from its products than the platforms have, Blanck added.
“So what would be the benefit of doing video within a classical embed on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok?” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense for us.”
Over the two months Axel Springer has been testing Moments, primarily within Bild’s sports section, where it has the most video content already produced, it has noticed audience time spent increasing as expected, Blanck said.
But the next step is determining whether a user spending time with the Moments player yields more ad revenue than having that same user bounce around to different pages and see more ad impressions as a result. To this end, Axel Springer considered developing a new KPI for determining revenue per time spent, “but this is a very challenging metric to figure out,” Blanck said.
“If people are watching minutes of video on your website with one pre-roll ad, is that worth more than five page views and [the accompanying] impressions?” he added. “Publishers need to evaluate that and try to understand how the KPI will shift.”
