Content recommendation widgets are the most widespread form of native advertising used by publishers globally and in India, especially with sinking display ad viewability and ad dollars shifting to mobile-friendly non-intrusive formats. Links such as ‘You Might Like’, ‘Sponsored Content’, ‘Recommended for You’, or ‘Around the Web’ which appear below the stories not only seem to be organic but also enable publishers to maximise their real estate and make additional revenues.
Native ad widgets like Outbrain, Taboola, Revcontent and Columbia are among the most popular content recommendation networks in India. In fact, all major publishers in India such as The Hindu, Moneycontrol.com, ScoopWhoop, Hindustan Times and even The Indian Express Group use some kind of content recommendation widget.
While recommendation platforms are a surefire way to monetise without much investment, globally a few publishers are also reconsidering them given the clickbait nature of the suggested stories. BrandWagon looks into how publishers and content recommendation partners in India are working to create a win-win situation and address the problem of clickbait and spam.
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The money is real
Even as banners are still the largest piece of advertising for most publishers, native advertising such as infeed advertising, content recommendation widgets and branded content are now the new focus areas for publishers to diversify their revenue streams, making up for falling print revenues and addressing the shift to mobile.
It is no surprise that most publishers are using content recommendation widgets because they bring convenient money and due to lack of growth in other sources of ad revenue beyond display such as branded content. Also, branded content has an advertising sort of setup — the process is longer and the collection is an issue. “Here, it takes 60 days for money to reach your bank account. However, when you work with Taboola, you know you will receive the money at the end of the month,” says Sattvik Mishra, CEO, ScoopWhoop. In fact, for many publishers, these widgets are becoming a significant revenue line as the benefit directly adds to their bottomline.
Publishers use these widgets for mainly two reasons — one, to get more traffic when they put their content on other publications via these widgets, and two, by using the widget to rent the real estate to other publishers and get paid when a reader clicks on one of these external links.
For NDTV, 20% of its revenue through advertising comes from Taboola while the remaining 80% is banner ads. It has a R100 crore worth three-year deal with Taboola which is currently in its second year.
“NDTV uses Taboola both for increasing the traffic and revenues. From a P&L perspective, it adds straight to the bottomline. There is no investment required from the publisher,” says Shouneel Charles, head of revenue and chief sales and marketing officer, NDTV Convergence. “A lot of traffic comes from search and social. Such users are mostly there to read one or two articles. So we make money out of such traffic by using Taboola. While the partner actually takes traffic away from the site, we make money when readers click on these links.” NDTV is also working on branded content especially in the video space for sectors such as travel and auto.
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For ScoopWhoop, about 5-7% of the total revenue comes from Taboola; display is another 15%. About 80% revenue comes from branded content. “We experimented both with Outbrain and Taboola. Currently we are with Taboola, but we keep switching back and forth. We are not big fans of content recommendation widgets. The only reason we use it is because it is another revenue stream,” says Mishra.
Going forward, ScoopWhoop plans to work less with display and content networks and more with brands and create content for them. Unlike how NDTV does it, Mishra of ScoopWhoop believes that for the digital company, Taboola or Outbrain make sense only from a revenue perspective. “We are using Taboola only for the ‘More from web’ section,” he says.
However, experts assert that content recommendation platforms work best for publishers who work on scale and reach a large number of people, so that the revenue generated is of decent size.
Content control: filters and checks
Experts say that publishers are gradually losing control over content discovery, but that does not stop them from monetising their page views. Advertising is the strongest and only means for publishers to earn revenue. Multiple subscriptions for outlets are neither feasible nor can they achieve scale. “I foresee publishers being more cognizant of the ad networks they tie-up with, to make advertising contextual for their users. Ad blockers will only prove detrimental because they will serve advertising eventually, for their own business models,” says Arun Pattabhiraman, VP and global head of marketing, InMobi.
To enable contextual and personalised content discovery, Taboola and Outbrain are working closely with publishers. Both of them enable publishers to filter content and users can also block the ads.
“We analyse real-time signals including location, device type and social media trends to serve recommendations. Beyond that, we have guidelines outlining what is acceptable and what is not,” says Adam Singolda, founder and CEO, Taboola. The platform reaches over a billion people a month surfacing 12 billion recommendations every day globally. In fact, over 40% of Taboola’s traffic is generated on mobile and also enables publishers to embed Taboola’s personalised content recommendations on AMP pages, with a focus now on video.
Outbrain, which serves approximately 250 billion content recommendations every month and reaches half-a-billion unique visitors across the globe, is working with Moneycontrol, Business Standard, Outlook Group including Outlook Money, India.com, Patrika.com and Eenadu to help them drive traffic, retarget audiences and even get new audiences. Its solution, Automatic Yields, further helps publishers track the revenue value of content in real-time. “Mobile is becoming much larger for a publisher’s overall share of page views. For some publishers in India, 90% of page views are coming from mobile,” says Sandeep Balani, director, business development, India, Outbrain.
According to NDTV, working with content recommendation widgets is a win-win if benchmarks are set clearly with premium partners to avoid spam and low quality links such as adult content and gambling. “We also use Taboola’s newsroom analytics tool to help the editorial team position stories on the page and understand which story is doing well in real-time,” says Charles.
While Google and Facebook are leaders in this space, Taboola and Outbrain have carved a niche too. “Google and FB operate in a more walled garden environment where it’s harder for publishers to monetise and have a direct dialogue with their users, which eventually is needed to fund high quality journalism and grow the open web — and that’s where we fit,” says Singolda.
