Google's Adsense Knocks Off Taboola / Outbrain / Etc

[Devil Anse]

On Google's Inside Adsense Blog they've just introduced Matched Content units.

Aka they've finally gotten around to knocking off Taboola, Outbrain, and those outfits.

To use them, you have to be a site with "multiple pages and high volumes of traffic." You have to check your site management settings in Adsense to see if you're eligible to even run the ads.

They claim the following benefits:

• Discover relevant articles on your site
• Spend more time on your pages
• Engage more with your content

I'm going to disagree with the 2nd two points and say it does the exact opposite, not that we don't realize that. Just calling BS when I see it.

You guys talking about Outbrain and Taboola and these others, such as @built and the few threads in the orientation room... Now you can go for it without applying... if Google's algo decides your site is worthy.

 

[Postmortis]

Interesting, great share.

I suppose it would only be a matter of time before Google can make money of this by placing ads that go to different websites on a CPC basis (what Outbrain etc are doing).

 

[Samwise89]

I guess this is really only worth it for viral sites, news sites, and sites where traffic is there and gone in a poof, because you're not really offering anything than a quick bite of entertainment. It'll be cool to know what the limitations are to sign up when people start to figure it out. I'm guessing it's based on good standing with adsense, but mainly number of pageviews. It says "number of pages" too.

More interesting is what the CPC's will be like to buy traffic with it. I'm guessing it'll be higher than the other programs since they'll have more advertisers bidding.

You could buy from Outbrain and Taboola and offset the cost, like @Tavin mentions, with Adsense. Possibly even make money instead of just offsetting cost? I bet google would get mad though.