Outbrain

Outbrain first marketed its content discovery platform in 2006.

It was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, who were both officers in the Israeli Navy. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million. Lahav worked at Shopping.com, acquired by eBay in 2005.

The company is headquartered in New York with global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cologne, Gurugram, Paris, Ljubljana, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, São Paulo, Netanya, Singapore, and Sydney.

Outbrain went public in July 2021. The company offered 8 million shares in the IPO, bringing in $160 million.

Mergers and acquisitions

Outbrain has acquired 6 companies—related content recommendation platform, Surphace (February 2011), content curation platform, Scribit (December 2012), and predictive analytics company, Visual Revenue (March 2013). In early 2016, Outbrain acquired technology company Revee. In July 2017, Outbrain acquired Zemanta. In February 2019, Outbrain acquired Ligatus.

In October 2019, Outbrain announced its intention to merge with Taboola under the Taboola brand. In September 2020, Taboola and Outbrain ceased merger discussions.

In August 2024, Outbrain and Teads announced plans to merge in "an approximately $1 billion transaction".

In February 2025, Outrain announced the closing of its acquisition of Teads, following receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals. Following Outbrain’s acquisition of Teads in February 2025, they announced in June that the combined company has completed its corporate renaming from “Outbrain Inc.” to “Teads Holding Co.”

Products

Outbrain is a native advertising company. It uses targeted advertising to recommend articles, slideshows, blog posts, photos or videos to a reader. Some of the content recommended by Outbrain link to publisher's own content, while others link to other sites.

As of March 2019, Outbrain's promoted articles are found on 108,121 websites. In 2020, Outbrain delivered an average of 10 billion recommendations daily for over 20,000 advertisers.

Business model

Advertisers typically pay on a pay-per-click basis and publishers generate income from external clicks. Approximately 75% of that revenue is paid to the site or app which presented the Outbrain link. Outbrain shares advertising revenue with publishers who implement their feeds or links on their sites, which are sometimes referred to as chumboxes.