Category: Outbrain

Company integrity – having a Single Story

Yaron Galai5 Comments

One of the paramount aspects for us at Outbrain, since the day we started, is maintaining the company’s integrity. There are many different ways we make integrity the core of our company DNA,  but having a “single story” is probably one of the most important ones.

The ‘single story’ principle means that there’s not the slightest difference between the spirit of what is said or expected from our team internally, to what is said to our investors, to what is said to our partners and clients or publicly to the press. If we say we stick to a certain principle, there’s no winking, or lip service, to *any* of our constituencies. For example, when we say that publishers are our true partners, there’s no backroom dealings of any kind that would undermine that in any way. When we announce publicly that we don’t accept any misleading advertisers, it’s my expectation from my team that we strive to comply with that as strictly as we can, even if it costs us dearly in lost revenue. And its the same single story that my investors (existing AND potential) would hear. It’s that same single story I wouldn’t mind having printed on the front page of the NYT’s, because I’d be proud standing behind it with all the constituents that are part of Outbrain.

So many companies in our space seem to put a facade of similar integrity, yet at the same time maintain multiple different stories – one for the market, a very different one for employees, and a very different one for investors. In the short run these facades can probably work. But I suspect that in the long run it’s impossible to hold onto different stories for different constituencies. Integrity in that sense is a lot like a pregnancy – you can’t be half-pregnant, and you can’t run a company with integrity on some fronts but not others. It’s either a principle you stick to, and then *always* do, with all constituencies. Or it’s not.

In short: Business needs can be turned on or off for integrity; but integrity can never be turned on or off in the face of business needs.

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Outloud

Yaron Galai2 Comments

Today we (=Outbrain) are announcing the launch of our sponsored link program called Outloud. Outbrain now powers the recommended/related article links (“People who liked this article also liked these:”) on thousands of blogs and newspapers including USA Today, Slate, Fox, Tribune, Golf.com and SportingNews.

Using Outloud, companies and bloggers can now submit links to stories into our index. We then show links to those stories on the most relevant pages in our network. The cost is a flat $10-per-month for each story you choose to submit via Outloud. There is no long-term commitments or anything like that, so this is practically risk-free.

Here are a few examples of what Outloud is perfect for:

  1. Amplifying earned media – Having bloggers write an authentic, positive review of your company or product is one of the most powerful endorsements you could ever hope for. But once that blog post is written – how many people actually read it? How do you get more, interested people to read those reviews? With Outloud you can submit links to authentic reviews of your company or product, and we’ll show them to people who are actively reading related content.
  2. Amplifying PR – Similarly, PR folks are focused on getting press and blog coverage for their clients. But once your client gets the PR, how can you maximize its effect. For $10/month on Outloud you can amplify great press coverage and get many more people to hear about it.
  3. Getting new readers – If you’re a blogger looking to get new readers exposed to your content, Outloud is a great and affordable way to do it. Choose the 5-10 stories on your blog which you think are best, and submit them to Outloud for $10/month each. We will then show your links on the most relevant pages in out network of thousands of blogs and newspapers.

The idea around Outloud is simple – we want to be able to show the best sponsored links possible on each page using our service. And to do that, we don’t want you thinking twice of whether you should or shouldn’t be submitting stories to Outloud – we’ve reduced the price barrier to the lowest reasonably possible.

The links you submit can be on your own blog, or on any other website in the world. If Walt Mossberg covered your company on WSJ, you are more than welcome to submit that link to Outloud as well. In fact, we think that the best links to submit would be authentic stories writen about you by other people.

But what we do insist on is that all links in Outloud be pointing to interesting, real content. We will be gladly rejecting any links to spam, scams, non-disclosed self-promotions, fake content, splogs, etc. Outbrain has always been about providing readers with the most interesting and relevant links, and we plan to continue doing so whether the links are free or sponsored.

Here’s an example of how Outloud links might look on a site using our service:

So go ahead and submit your stories to Outloud, and get them read!

(Thanks Eze for the coverage!)

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The Lighthouse

Yaron Galai1 Comment

A key to a successful startup journey is to always know where you’re headed. The company has to always have a single lighthouse that it is pursuing. More importantly – everyone on your team has to know exactly what that lighthouse is. This might sound easy, but in reality most startups fail miserably on choosing a lighthouse, communicating it clearly to the team, and sticking to it obsessively.

Credit: Kevin Lau

A healthy lighthouse can usually be reduced to a chart. Curiously, the most trivial chart – the revenue chart – is hardly ever a good lighthouse to choose… I’ll explain why below. The lighthouse, if properly communicated to every single person in the company, should determine pretty much everything that gets done by by each team member. In a company with a clearly communicated lighthouse, everyone – junior or senior, engineer or biz dev, in NY HQ or in the Israel R&D – should prioritize tasks nearly identically. If your company is struggling often with priorities, your problem is extremely simple to diagnose – you are most likely missing a clear lighthouse.

For a web company, the trivial lighthouses are – page views, unique users, etc. Choosing trivial metrics as the company’s lighthouse is acceptable, but the problem is that it will likely be the same lighthouse used by many other companies. That means that that the faster/bigger boat, not necessarily the smarter one, will likely win. If you are the biggest baddest boat around (aka “Google”) – you should be fine. If you’re among the 99.9% other startups, you might want to dig deeper and find your unique lighthouse.

A good lighthouse is also clearly actionable. A lighthouse that implies action will help everyone focus on the biggest opportunities. For example – when all search engines were focused on ranking sites based on keyword counts, Google’s lighthouse was to perfect the ranking of results based on the site’s authority. Later when Google was a late entrant to the PPC search advertising market, their lighthouse was maximizing the yield of each ad shown while their main competition was focused on maximizing the bids.

Which brings me to another attribute of a good lighthouse. And this one isn’t always achievable, but it’s beautiful when it is –
A great lighthouse is fairly invisible outside the company. In Google’s example, it isn’t immediately clear to an outsider how search results are ranked, and is therefore very difficult to play the same game. A good lighthouse let’s you compete in a crowded market while playing a game that’s completely different from your competition.

Revenue is therefore almost never a good lighthouse. It is not actionable and it does inherently not let you play a different game in the same ball field. But unless you’re doing not-for-profit work, revenues is probably a primary goal for you and your shareholders. The right way to reconcile this gap is to ensure that your chosen lighthouse has a reasonable eventual linkage to revenues. For example, if your lighthouse is to maximize unique users, that can later (if successful!) be translated to advertising revenues.

The lighthouse cascade

Most importantly for startups – a lighthouse is *not* permanent. It should evolve as the company grows and develops its product. The important thing is to know when to transition lighthouses, how to do it, and most critically – how to communicate to everyone what the current lighthouse is.

Each lighthouse should have a logical connection to the next one. For example, your 1st lighthouse might be to focus on building a big user base, while your 2nd lighthouse might be to maximize the page-views (so the actionable parts are to grow both the user base, as well as page-views-per-user). Each metric should eventually be a supporter of those future metrics.

The lighthouse metrics should not only cascade logically from one to the next, but also eventually have a strong connection to revenues. Choosing a good lighthouse and planning how your metrics will eventually cascade into revenues does not ensure your company’s success, but it is nearly impossible to succeed if you (and your whole team) don’t know what your lighthouse is at all times.

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