Publishers know they need to diversify their revenue, but with limited site real estate, managing opportunities effectively can be challenging, especially since some users are more likely to engage with a podcast over a newsletter or buy a product.
Keystone - Outbrain’s business optimisation platform for media owners - solves this problem by applying Outbrain’s proprietary bidding and optimisation AI technologies to integrate every revenue-generating facet of a publisher’s site, providing one holistic view of performance across all departments and goals.
AdNews spoke with Yaron Galai, co-founder and co-CEO of Outbrain, about why user journeys are important for publishers to better understand, the role that a mix of AI and editorial curation plays in aligning business objectives and the way that Keystone can help the publishing business remove its dependency on big tech.
“When you think of all the tech platforms we use today, we’ve become accustomed to curated content. But outside of advertising, publishers generally manage everything else almost like they did in the 1950s - manually.
“The impetus for creating Keystone was simple: nearly all publishers are at some stage of revenue diversification. Yet the business stakeholders at publishers do not have the technology needed to grow their business, while maintaining the user experience their audiences expect.
“We wanted to leverage our unique experience and the technologies we’ve built to deliver ROI on business KPIs for advertisers to empower publishers in growing their overall, diversified business.”
Galai said that one of the biggest challenges publishers face is optimising the user journey with the right content, while balancing their own business initiatives to diversify revenue.
“This goes beyond just serving the right advert at the right time, but using these insights to understand when the best time to offer something from their own ecommerce offerings, a new subscription or something else from the publisher’s own portfolio."
Galai said that Keystone utilises some of the core algorithm elements of Outbrain’s marketer technology as the foundation for publishers to automatically optimise for any business outcomes, anywhere on their sites and apps.
“For the first time, this technology is also available to publishers, helping them optimise everything from user journeys to business outcomes.
“The Keystone dashboard provides full transparency and a unified view of business initiatives, creating oversight on what is driving revenue with real-time insights to inform strategy.
“They can now optimise the entire reader experience to deliver the best value and begin to break old organisational silos. For example, a publisher may have a podcast or want to promote an ecommerce initiative. How do they select the best link?
“Publishers can now use real data to inform those decisions while still maintaining full control of the site while delivering a better user experience.
"Keystone is the platform for the CEO/CDO to maximise their overall business, and balance it with a great user experience.”
Galai said that as consumers, we’ve come to expect relevancy, so the immediate advantage of Keystone is to help improve user experience, making sites stickier and creating more return users.
Keystone has a prediction engine which observes the user behaviour and conversions, learning in real time and using this data to predict which offer, link or content to put in front of the publisher at the right time.
“As a complete self-serve platform, publishers no longer need to rely on their Product or Data Science teams in order to optimise the experience.
“Publishers get insights as to which business initiatives to focus on, adding that layer of curation which is so important - making sure the most important content is given prominence. This helps keep people informed of what matters most, not just the things they think they want."
Galai said that the AI technology Keystone uses is needed to help publishers align their complete business objectives.
“The conversion prediction engine uses AI to create dynamic user segmentation in real-time to predict the best outcome, yet that isn’t to say there's not a place for editorial curation from publishers.
“What we’ve learned from social media is that creating echo chambers and only giving people what they think they want doesn’t lead to good outcomes, personally or for society.
“We all need to be exposed to the important things we need to know. Publishers therefore have a vital curation role for content. It needs to be safeguarded, and this is a great tool to do that.”
Galai said that he envisions Keystone’s impact upon the wider industry of digital publishers to be twofold – firstly, solving the problem that users are accustomed to a curated experience, but publishers’ tools have not kept pace with what users are expecting, and secondly, empowering internal teams with technology that can help the publishing business remove dependency on big tech.
“It allows them to diversify their revenue by removing barriers from trying new things. It empowers teams and removes internal competition on real estate. The result will be a better experience for the users while maximising value for publishers.”
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