Six months since its launch to the Australian market, Outbrain is turning the monetisation of online publishing upside-down.

Outbrain is a “content discovery platform” for publishers – it provides links to other web content that it believes will interest the reader, enabling publishers to monetise through third-party content.

Headquartered in New York and established six years ago, Outbrain is just beginning to make a mark in Australia, with major online publishers including The Age, SMH and news.com.au on its books. Outbrain is responsible for those ‘recommended’ links to other news stories underneath publishers’ content.

Ayal Steiner (pictured), general manager of Outbrain Australia, told B&T: “We algorithmically predict what other pieces of content would be most engaging for the reader.

“Behind the scenes, there is a lot of technology that goes into looking at the data and offering content for each reader. But, on face value on the page, it just helps the reader discover as much content as possible – similar to flipping the page in a magazine. And it’s not an ad – it’s part of the reading experience.”

Worldwide, Outbrains powers more than 80,000 sites, including CNN, Fox News, ABC News, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. It powers more than 70 billion page recommendations a month.

Steiner added: “We put our readers first and make sure they trust the publisher to show them interesting pieces of content. But for the publishers, it’s a new monetisation avenue. Any publisher will say that Outbrain is the number one top performing unit on their pages.”

And Outbrain has big plans in Australia. “What we see today in Australia is just the beginning,” Steiner told B&T. “We will be introducing mobile with our publishers soon.