Outbrain to launch personalisation product for publishers

Outbrain, which now owns real-time data platform Visual Revenue, today announced the impending launch of a new personalisation product, to help news sites deliver stories most relevant to the audience.

The new product is currently being tested in beta with more than 10 publishers with plans for a public launch later in the year.

The idea is to enable editors to signal a series of stories for use, which the technology can then select a certain number from based on the appetite of the audience arriving on the webpage.

The key feature is the editorial involvement in the process.

"We think we can actually incorporate the editors into the conversation," former chief executive of Visual Revenue Dennis Mortensen told Journalism.co.uk, by giving editors the ability to personalise using "a framework which [they] have control of".

For example, in cases where there are certain stories in the selection which the editor wants to feature in a carousel, for example, no matter what, then they can use the personalisation product to "give me instructions on how I'm allowed to personalise".

"So you can actually inject editorial instructions into personalisation," Mortensen said. "So all of a sudden they become perhaps more of a personalisation maestro than really just an editor who surrendered to personalisation and said 'oh, I'm not a participant anymore'."

Visual Revenue delivers "recommendations" to newsrooms based on real-time data, to help them make more effective editorial decisions.

The technology aims to "try to empower the editor", chief executive of Visual Revenue Dennis Mortensen said at the Global Editors Network in Paris today,

For more from the Global Editors Network follow #gen13, @rmcathy, @SarahMarshall3, @johncthompson.

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