Outbrain: Too brainy for a simple outreach
January 21, 2019

Outbrain: Too brainy for a simple outreach

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Outbrain

My company, a news media, is looking for a platform to market our articles. We were previously using another content distribution platform but we're looking for a cheaper alternative due to weakening currency (IDR). Outbrain came as an alternative as it offered cheaper CPC than our previous choice. There were also other alternatives, but Outbrain is significantly more well-known and hence trusted in our view.
  • Website network: Outbrain provides high-quality websites in its network so that you can get a quality audience.
  • Affordable pricing: The CPC offered by Outbrain is relatively cheaper than other alternatives.
  • Content dashboard: The dashboard allows you to edit the content before publishing it on Outbrain's platform.
  • Confusing dashboard: I am used to using a content distribution platform similar to Outbrain, but I was honestly overwhelmed by the complexity of Outbrain's dashboard.
  • Difficulties in adding new contents: I don't know why but I often encountered an error message while adding a batch of new contents to the dashboard. The message basically said that the content violated Outbrain's terms and policies, despite them being safe (proven when it was considered okay when I input the content links one by one).
  • Blacklist and whitelist: The features are offered in Outbrain, but it is relatively difficult to set up as you really have to check the websites you want one by one. In my experience, Outbrain does not offer a group of similar websites in the whitelist recommendation. This will help a lot. For instance, a group of news media websites should be recommended to be whitelisted for a news company user.
  • Outbrain delivers, but that's it. It does its job based on your budget and CPC, but not more than that. I can say that this is a bit disappointing since another platform that we used, Taboola, delivers more than its worth.
  • The users that we get from Outbrain did not translate into quality clicks and session. They only clicked the links on Outbrain and never went further than that. I get that we can tweak the blacklist and whitelist feature to have a better audience, but well, who has the time for that.
  • On the bright side, their customer service is actually quite helpful. We were just a bit hesitant and reluctant to continue using Outbrain due to the dashboard's complexities, low-quality clicks that came, and the fact that we could negotiate a better deal with another platform.
Initially, we used Outbrain because we felt that Taboola was getting too expensive. However, after a month trial and a rather disappointing result, we are going back with Taboola. Still happy with Taboola (I wrote about this at length in a separate review). Outbrain is good, but its results and my experience during the trial were not that great to abandon Taboola altogether.
Outbrain is well suited when you have the time to deal with all of its features and complexities. It allows you to customize the content and where your content will be promoted, as well as having a more sophisticated targeting feature. However, for the user like me, who is used to a simpler dashboard, Outbrain can be a tad too overwhelming.

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