Outbrain partners with Telaria to offer video ads

Content discovery platform Outbrain is today announcing an exclusive partnership with video ad platform Telaria, resulting in the content discovery platform’s first sustained offering of outstream video ads.

Outbrain’s grid of recommended stories appears as thumbnails underneath a site’s stories, providing “other content you may like.” The video ad will appear above or below the Outbrain grid, as wide as the grid.

Site publishers can determine if they want the video ad at all, or whether the ad will appear in the above or below position, and there will be no contextual matching with page content. The video ads — available in 30-, 90- and 120-second lengths — will automatically play when the user scrolls down to that part of the page — silently, unless a user clicks on the video.

Here’s a publisher’s page, with Outbrain’s two-thumbnail-wide grid on the right side, and the Telaria video ad above it:

Matt Crenshaw, Outbrain’s US General Manager, said that video snippets have played on occasion in the Outbrain grid instead of thumbnails, and that will sometimes still occur. As with the thumbnails, those have been publishers’ own promoted content or paid placements for ad-like content. But the new videos will only be ads.

Telaria (formerly Tremor Video) CEO Mark Zagorski described his company to me as a kind of a video SSP (supply-side platform), working through several dozen DSPs (demand-side platforms) to place video ads for companies in over-the-top (OTT) TV and web, such as Dish, A&E, Hulu and Condé Nast. This is Telaria’s first exclusive partnership with a content discovery service.

Outbrain says it reaches about a billion users every month, through the sites of CNN, Meredith Corporation, New York Post and others. There are no stats yet on how many publishers have opted into this new offering.

Video is becoming an increasingly important part of content discovery services. About a year ago, for instance, Outbrain competitor Taboola announced it was integrating with The Trade Desk ad-buying platform so that advertisers could place video and native ads through the same interface.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.