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Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

I'm very surprised that I see Outbrain ads when I visit cnn.com. Google have a decade of of my email history, my search queries, my Android location, my YouTube history, etc, etc. Yet apparently Outbrain's advertising is so effective that they can offer more money to CNN to place ads. What is going on?

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Outbrain doesn't offer more money as much as steady money. When I talked to an advertising person about it, she told me we had a guarantee from them for a certain amount. That makes budgeting much simpler. You don't have to worry about if you make your traffic numbers or not.

With that logic, google (and a handful of other giants like FB and Amazon) should be the ONLY companies in the digital advertising space. There're probably other factors in play here.

Its mostly around the CPC business model for advertisers, and the performance-optimized block of ads for publishers. Pubs get steady payouts with a single block of code, and advertisers only have to pay for clicks, which are generally pretty cheap.

AdSense has a similar CPC model, but leaves it to the publisher to place individual ads, and suffers from bifurcated demand- much of the Google ad money flows to their CPM / Impression based Ad Exchange banner ads.

Direct response advertisers do very well with content-rec style ads. I would never think its okay to run them as a publisher, but thousands of big sites can't say no.

It sounds like there are cracks in the idea that Google's info harvesting apparatus gives them the ultimate edge in advertising

Because clickbait 1) looks like normal content, so the brain doesn't filter it out, 2) is more likely to provoke clicks than actual ads.

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