Outbrain Launches Recommendations Into Ratings Widget

Outbrain has announced that the discovery portion of their ratings widget is now public and available for any blog to use. We have been running their widget on CN for about 60 days. So far, 429 clicks through the recommendations option, of which 295 were from inside CN where people were clicking on "same site" recommendations and 134 were outside referrals from people clicking on CN posts that were displayed as recommended reading on other blogs outside CN. When you install the widget, you can select to only show related stories from your blog, from blogs you select or from any blog running the widget as well.

I've said all along that ratings alone really aren't that meaningful. Especially without information about the rating party. But the idea of tying ratings and content discovery together makes the Outbrain widget much more useful. The ability for a user to view two stories (or more) versus only one can mean profitability for a blog.

Outbrain can also populate a most popular widget based on the ratings and they provide an analysis report based on your user ratings and recommendations.

Here is an example of what the discovery widget looks like on CN:

The only thing I've noticed is that sometimes the suggested stories don't seem to match up with the original story. In this case, the original story was about Twitter but somehow the system felt like a Google Calendar story was related. I am guessing the system gets smarter over time.

What would really kick ass is to get this discovery bit into the rss feed. My guess is that their business model will be to drop in sponsored related links over time. Check out my chat with Outbrain executives from last year. Adam at Mashable has some additional thoughts on the recommendations.