Outbrain Releases Keystone: A Holistic Business Optimization Platform for Media Owners

Outbrain Inc., a leading recommendation platform for the open web, officially released Keystone by Outbrain: a holistic business optimization technology built to align a publisher’s complete set of business initiatives with a more tailored experience for audiences. Going beyond driving ad revenue, Keystone applies Outbrain’s proprietary bidding and optimization AI technologies to integrate every revenue-generating facet of a publisher’s site, including subscriptions, eCommerce, and any other business goal unique to each publisher. Keystone was unveiled earlier this week to a select group of publishers during Outbrain’s “The Future of Media” summit.

“For over 15 years, we’ve worked side-by-side with publishers to help them drive revenue through advertising. This has given us insight into the opportunities and challenges they face as they continue to optimize the user journey while balancing business initiatives and revenue diversification,” said Yaron Galai, co-founder and co-CEO of Outbrain. “Keystone is a technology that publishers can rely on to make the most of audiences’ digital experiences while preserving quality editorial content. The anticipated result is a tailored user experience supporting a more diversified revenue mix that positions our media partners for future growth.”

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While Outbrain’s current recommendation technology provided nearly $745M in direct payments to Outbrain’s media partners in 2021 alone, Keystone is expected to help media owners increase their earnings by providing a more customized experience for readers across all properties and initiatives. The technology utilizes Outbrain’s AI conversion prediction-engine to create dynamic user segmentation, and the Keystone dashboard provides full transparency and a unified view of business initiatives to monitor and report on KPIs, inform strategies, and gather insights in real time.

“With publisher ad revenues under pressure, static experiences across all touchpoints are causing them to leave money on the table,” commented Amit Elisha, General Manager of Keystone and VP, Products of Outbrain. “Providing a more tailored experience for readers by understanding their intent will create loyalty, ultimately driving repeat visits and increasing the value of a publisher’s business.”

Keystone currently has four design partners including a large US news publisher and a leading European financial publisher. Early results have shown that one placement on a home page, optimized for multiple campaigns with Keystone, can lead to a 30-50% increase in user engagement for those placements. Pricing is based on a SaaS model to enable publishers to deploy the Keystone platform with full flexibility, regardless of whether they’re integrated with Outbrain’s core content recommendation products.

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