Outbrain has today launched its “Sponsored but Good” program, an advertising product that offers contextual links within its recommended reading unit.

Outbrain is perhaps best known for offering post ratings, but along with ratings Outbrain also offered recommended links, either internally within a site (they power both blogs and traditional media sites), externally within a group, or externally across their entire member network.

The new program adds a sponsored link to the list of recommendations. But not simply a standard sponsored link, but a link that is contextual within the standard recommendations. For example, a post on stock broking would offer alongside normal recommendations a sponsored link about stockbroking, so users only see ads that are strictly related to the content in the post (that’s a basic example, in practice it’s more refined). One thing Outbrain excels at is matching related content, and in my experience it’s close to industry best in content matching, even more so than Google with Adsense.

Contextual advertising and sponsored links aren’t new, but this offering sits somewhere in between a standard Adsense unit, and intext advertising.

From Outbrain

Our thinking goes like this: readers come to your site to read. They are looking for other great stories to read, which is why the engagement rates on the recommendations we provide today are so high. So through Sponsored But Good, companies can now participate in bringing your readers interesting content by sponsoring the distribution of great, interesting stories. There are millions (well, at least many thousands!) of wonderful articles and blog posts that have positive, authentic things to say about specific brands and products. These authentic endorsements are often written simply because the author loved some aspect of the product or service. Sponsored But Good allows advertisers to promote great, authentic endorsements of their product or service by distributing links to these endorsements through our network.

Notably the links are placed across the network based on context, so all sites using Outbrain benefit from each advertiser where their content matches what the advertiser is promoting.

Links are served through javascript and do not pass Google rank, so there’s no attempt to game Google that some products are currently trying to do.

It’s a clever take on contextual advertising and a natural fit for a company I’ve got a lot of time for, but one I’ve always wondered how it would make money. The only question now is will advertisers embrace the idea in a tough market, and will bloggers see decent revenue for it. We’d average around 1000-2000 clicks a day from Outbrain internally (our best day this month was 6,000), so that might be 200-500 clicks on contextual ads. Not a huge number, but it all helps.

Related posts:

1. The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?
2. Outbrain lands b5media blogs
3. Outbrain offers Disqus integration

Outbrain has taken $12 million Series B in a round led by Carmel Ventures that included previous investors Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and GlenRock Israel. Zohar Gilon and Rhodium also joined the round.

As part of the deal, Shlomo Dovrat from Carmel Ventures will be joining Outbrain’s board of directors.

Outbrain offers a ratings and recommendations services for websites and blogs. Most will be familiar with the rating side, although this is more a front for the more interesting recommendation side. Outbrain’s tech matches related content within a site, across a network of sites, or across all member sites (you get to pick) to recommend the best related content to readers.

Users include the Chicago Tribune, Discovery Channel and Sports Illustrated’s Golf.com.

Related posts:

1. The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?
2. Outbrain Offers Blog Ratings And Recommendations
3. Outbrain lands b5media blogs

Blog ratings and recommendation service Outbrain has launched their first integration with commenting 2.0 service Disqus.

With the first release, links to Disqus comments will now be offered as standard to users who use both services. In the wild, the addition includes a link on the word comments.

To access the feature, users don’t need to upgrade their Outbrain plugin, as the link will be automatically provided (it’s not on The Inquisitr yet because we don’t run a standard externally served version of Outbrain, but it will eventually be here).

John LoGioco writes on the Outbrain blog that “In many cases the position of the outbrain rater at the footer of each post lifts the Disqus comment link higher than the standard Disqus integration which should be a good thing.”

The integration is a first step for Outbrain, who have been talking about tie-ins with Disqus for some time. Both companies offer complimentary services, and in the battle for users, cross promotional deals like this help drive better products for users.

Disclosure: we run both services, but we have no financial arrangements with either company.

Related posts:

1. Finally, Disqus gets native FriendFeed support
2. Outbrain Offers Blog Ratings And Recommendations
3. JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus?

The deal includes both the Outbrain rating widget and the content recommendation platform. b5media will join a growing number of publishers using Outbrain who take up the option of recommending external amd well as internal content via the Outbrain embed, delivering a best of recommendations from across the Outbrain network of participating sites.

The Outbrain widget also personalizes recommendations to individual readers as more people interact with the content.

Surprisingly we haven’t written about Outbrain recently, but the company has been in regular touch, particularly as it has rolled out its “trusted sources” recommendations network. Sites on the network include Mashable, VentureBeat, The Inquisitr and CenterNetworks, and more recently the Chicago Tribune. As much as it annoys me when people come in with 1 star ratings over and over again (I wish I could IP block ratings), the service has worked well for us, and the recommendations, although not driving a huge amount of traffic, offer a value add for readers by automatically offering relevant content at the end of each post.

disclosure: I am a founder of b5media, although I have no relationship with the company today

Related posts:

1. The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?
2. SezWho lands b5media entertainment blogs
3. Outbrain raises $12 million Series B

Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.

I’m just as guilty here at The Inquisitr. The template doesn’t really allow for a old fashioned blogroll, and I’ve not tried to create one. And yet I miss the comradeship a blogroll use to offer, a way of sharing links to sites and people you liked or were friends with, and if you were lucky, you’d get a link back.

Google is at least partly to blame. The hysteria surrounding link=nofollow and blogs being punished for paid links made many would-be blogroll owners particularly shy of blogrolls.

Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

So what happened to the blogroll? Is there any alternatives you’re aware of? Or am I being overly sentimental? Leave a comment below or reply via video in the Seesmic embed with your thoughts.

No related posts.

The last part to me was the key benefit: it gives contextual based recommendations to content on other sites, providing a value add for readers who may be seeking further information or views on a given startup or service (note not every post, but regularly). It’s a great blogging 2.0 idea, but here’s the catch: you can tell the recommendation engine that you don’t want to give recommendations to other sites, making it (when used this way) nothing more than a glorified 1.0 widget.

The star rating system isn’t for everyone (I’m happy to recommend it, but it shouldn’t be compulsory), but here’s my challenge: if you are using Outbrain use the social features.

The reasons: it’s a value add to your readers, but more importantly if you are on the Outbrain network you’re getting links from sites who are being social. You’re taking from others and not giving back….and that’s in part greedy, in part just not very cool. For those using Outbrain but not sure about how to set this up (or whether it’s on or not), make sure your recommendations are set to “Best Possible” as opposed to “Limited.”

Related posts:

1. Outbrain lands b5media blogs
2. Outbrain Offers Blog Ratings And Recommendations
3. Outbrain raises $12 million Series B

New York/ Israeli startup Outbrain is a ratings and recommendation platform for blogs and news feeds.

The service works by users installing a plugin for their blog that adds a ratings button either at the top or bottom of each post (see the bottom of this post). At a base level it simply allows readers to rate a post, but Outbrain taps into these widgets to deliver a cross-blog/news recommendation system using collaborative filtering techniques. For example reading a post here about Blogging 2.0 might result (not yet, but in theory) recommendations of posts on Mashable, Centernetworks or Venturebeat, three large sites that are already using the Outbrain service.

It may seem like a small idea, but the company took $5 million Series A in a round led by Gemini Israeli Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners back in February. If you like this is a Technorati 2.0 style service and all the data Outbrain is gathering has a tangible value outside of the front end service.

We’re going to give it a shot here at The Inquisitr and see what happens, certainly it wouldn’t seem to be doing much harm having it here, and if it shares some traffic out of the site, and even back in again all the better.

Related posts:

1. The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?
2. Outbrain raises $12 million Series B
3. Outbrain offers Disqus integration