Outbrain vs. RevContent: Which is Better?

Many advertisers have a hard time choosing the best advertising network for their needs, and it usually boils down to what they need the network to perform or which has the most attractive features. 

From the large pool of advertising networks available today, a certain few stand out, and two of such mighty advertising networks are Outbrain and Revcontent. This article compares the two networks to help determine which will be more beneficial to advertisers. 

In this complete Outbrain Vs. RevContent guide, we'll look at the following:

• Available Ad Formats
• Popularity of Publishing Websites
• Advertising Network Features
• Ease of Use of Platform
• Price
• Customer Service

Buckle up, and let's begin!

Outbrain Vs RevContent: Available Ad Formats

The number of available ad formats on any advertising platform is one of the major things to look out for when making your choice. Most platforms offer a large variety of ad formats, while others provide just a few high-quality ones. However, let's see what these two networks have to offer in this regard.

Outbrain offers a total of seven ad formats for its advertisers, all with different features. These ad formats include:

• Standard Smartads: This is Outbrain's form of the classic native ad. With this, you can get new customers, increase your audience base, grow your brand. That's not all. Outbrain's Standard Smartads run on interest targeting that easily blends in with the web pages of premium publishers.

• Outstream Smartads: With Outstream Smartads, you can increase your brand awareness and the views you get on your videos.

• App install Smartads: Need more app installs? With Outbrain's App install Smartads, you can drive even more app installs. These app installs won't come from cheap or fake consumers but high LTV consumers.

• Carousel Smartads: Outbrain offers one of the best ways to showcase your products and services to your target audience. The carousel ad is incredibly interactive, and audiences can swipe to see more of what you offer.

• Click-to-Watch Smartads: Do you want more brand engagements? Outbrain has got you covered.  With their premium click-to-watch video ads, you can rest assured that there will be a boost in your brand engagement rates.

• Clip Smartads: Outbrain also provides animated clip Smartads for better ad performance.

• Native Awareness + Smartads: Though this ad format is still in its beta form, it's quite promising. With Outbrain's Native Awareness + Smartads, you can advertise your products while telling a story and driving real results.

On the other hand, Revcontent offers the following ad formats:

• Native Sponsored Content: These are the usual recommended content ads. You can feature ads in content form or directly load offer pages.

• Email and Newsletter Ads: These are ads that blend well inside email and newsletters.

• Google AMP: This type is actually also a recommended content ad, but it’s focused on mobile devices. They load really fast and have been built specifically for mobile-optimized websites.

• Video Ads: There are actually two kinds of video ads. The first one is an in-stream video ad, which plays before, during, or after video content. The second one is a video banner ad, which shows up in spaces meant for banner ads.

Based on the list above, it’s obvious that Outbrain has the upper hand when it comes to the availability of ad formats.

Outbrain Vs. RevContent: Popularity of Publishing Websites

Outbrain gives your ads a chance to be featured on some of the world's most popular sites. They have partnerships with thousands of high-quality publishing sites and continue to grow their list by creating even more partnerships.

It's not just about the number, Outbrain uses direct code-on-code integrations to give you better data for content interaction, seamless user experience, and upgraded targeting capabilities.

Here's the best part.

Outbrain's biggest and more popular partners are media and news publishers like MSN, The Washington Post, and CNN. They even have partnerships with a large variety of niche sites, including fashion, entertainment, technology, health, sports, and even finance. 

To solidify how popular Outbrain's publishing sites are, here is a list of some of their premium publishers: 

• Business Insider
• Time
• SBNATION
• InStyle
• VentureBeat
• Marie Claire
• Elle
• Eater
• Men'sHealth
• New York Post
• Time
• CarandDriver
• Vanity Fair
• Food&Wine

It's not just limited to Outbrain's direct partnerships; you can reach other popular publishing websites through OEN (Outbrain Extended Network). And, it doesn't attract extra cost.

RevContent is not one to be left behind, though, as included in its list of publishing sites are as follows:

• MediaForce
• USA Today Sports
• CBS Interactive
• Heavy
• Yahoo!
• The Penny Hoarder
• Los Angeles Times

When it comes to the number of publishing websites, Outbrain and RevContent are on par with each other. However, the number of publishers Outbrain has is so much more than RevContent. This also means you’ll have a wider range of website categories to choose from and more potential traffic volume.

Outbrain Vs. RevContent: Advertising Network Features

Here comes the juicy part. Features are a large determining factor for most advertisers. Every advertiser looks for that specific feature to improve traffic earning rates or improve marketing strategies. So, without further ado, let's dig into the features of these two advertising networks and find out which one suits your needs better.

1. Targeting

Outbrain gives you a ton of targeting options to make sure you reach the right audience at the right time.

Here are some of the targeting options you can find on your Outbrain dashboard:

• Placement Targeting

The first set of targeting options you'll meet when creating your campaign is placement targeting. Here, you can find platform targeting, OS, browser, and WiFi targeting options.

• Standard Targeting 

Next up are the standard targeting options. Here you can use geo-targeting and audience segmentation to set your preferred location and custom audience segments.

• Advanced Audience Targeting

Further down the campaign creation process, you'll also see advanced audience targeting options which allow you to focus on more granular targets. Here, you can find interest targeting and attribute targeting.

• Contextual Targeting

You also have the option to add contextual targeting to your campaign. The option under contextual targeting includes IAB category targeting. 

• Dynamic Retargeting

Outbrain offers its advertisers a way to bring back customers through their dynamic targeting option. It's quite different from standard retargeting, as it only applies when a user has viewed a product or added one to their carts.

• Advanced Placement Targeting

Towards the end of the campaign creation process, advertisers would meet the last targeting option: Advanced placement targeting. Here, you can find high-impact (ads would run in high-impact placements), MSN (ads would run exclusively on MSN), and Adblock.

RevContent, on the other hand, offers a granular targeting experience and is one of the few areas where it shines against Outbrain and other popular ad networks. 

RevContent offers over three thousand interest options to its advertisers, making it one of the best networks for targeting. Here are some of the other available granular targeting options you can find on RevContent:

• Country Targeting

RevContent allows you to choose between accepting worldwide traffic or narrowing your targeting to specific countries. Once you have your country in mind, you can proceed to select your preferred regions.

• Device Targeting

With RevContent's device targeting, you can choose if you want your traffic from mobile or desktop users. Furthermore, you choose your preferred operating system once you've selected one out of the two devices.

• Zip Code Targeting

For deeper targeting, try RevContent's zip code targeting. You'll be able to target specific cities or regions or even exclude them.

• Language Targeting

On RevContent, you can choose between "all languages" or "specific language" targeting. However, you must meet certain conditions. If the language for your ad is not available, then you can choose the "all languages" option. And, you must select the "specific language" option if the language for your ad is available.

• WhiteList and Blacklists

You can easily add things to your whitelist or blacklist on both RevContent and Outbrain to ensure your ads get to the right users at the right time. The whitelist/blacklist options you can find include: 

• Geo
• Interest topics
• Type of device
• Placements 
• Specific websites (Brand)

Outbrain's anti-fraud team uses both internal safeguard and an additional layer of security from CHEQ to help ensure that all users get clean and safe traffic. Outbrain's anti-fraud team looks out for two things: detection and prevention of all fraudulent activities, both human and automated.

RevContent ensures your brand safety with its built-in anti-fraud technology. Advertisers can rest easy and be safe from fraudulent users and bot clicks. RevContent ensures you have direct and exclusive relationships with premium publishers, access to real-time reporting, and placement and domain transparency.

Outbrain's real-time data gives you access to changes happening live to your campaign. You can get data on the impressions, spend, click-through rate, average CPC, average CPA, and conversion rates of your campaigns. In other words, the engage dashboard has tracking capabilities that monitor all the real-time statistics on your widget's performance and the earned revenue.

RevContent offers a solid set of reporting tools that generate data to help you make important decisions about your marketing strategies. The reporting tools you can find on RevContent include: 

• Pageview Tracking
• Budget pacing
• Image and S2S pixels
• Fractional bidding
• Granular blacklisting tools

But if you want to be able to deeply analyze traffic being delivered to your landing pages, you should use a third-party tracking platform with deeper analytics, much like Brax.

In 2012, Outbrain launched the Amplify self-service platform for advertisers to control all aspects of their campaigns and drive highly engaged audiences to their best offers and online content.

Moreover, RevContent offers an intuitive reporting and campaign interface that lets you control everything about your marketing budget.

Outbrain Vs. RevContent: Ease of use of Platform

Outbrain is quite easy to use, and it features an incredibly intuitive UI which advertisers who have run campaigns on other networks should be familiar with. Outbrain is still simple enough to use without prior knowledge if you're a newcomer.

Also, RevContent has a simple and user-friendly interface that makes it easy to fully set up your campaigns. You can easily navigate the dashboard of this network and take full control of the budget, impressions, and daily audience reach.

Both platforms are pretty easy to use once you try them out.

Outbrain Vs. RevContent: Price

Outbrain works on the CPC (cost-per-click) model and only charges you for the number of clicks on your content. Additionally, Outbrain charges a credit card processing fee of 2.9 – 4%, which always shows on your billing. The bid prices for desktop CPC start from $0.05 while mobile starts from $0.03. Outbrain has a daily campaign limit of $20, making it a budget-friendly way to maximize ROI.

In contrast, RevContent charges a credit card processing fee of 3.15%. Although the minimum amount for funding your account is $50, and you need a $100 budget daily for each campaign you make, its bid price can go as low as $0.01 per click. 

However, all advertisers worth their salt knows that price is relative. If you can get a better Return of Investment with Outbrain than with RevContent, even if you spend more with Outbrain, it can be “cheaper” in the long run.

Outbrain Vs. RevContent: Customer Service

Overall, Outbrain offers great customer service that's polite and ready to assist you. Outbrain's customer support usually responds within twenty-four business hours. If you are working in the same timezone as Outbrain’s representatives, you may get a response sooner. You can reach Outbrain's customer service via email or phone call.

Customer service is one of the strengths of RevContent. They give account representatives to their clients to help with any problems faced during the campaign setup. However, in cases where they can't issue an account representative, RevContent's knowledgeable and dedicated support is always ready to help, assist and offer optimization suggestions. 

If your questions are not answered immediately, the support team will be sure to send a response team within one business day.

Overall Winner: Outbrain

After comparing the two power ad networks, we believe Outbrain wins. Although both networks are primarily native advertising networks, Outbrain offers more ad formats than RevContent, and its traffic volume is so much more.

But these are just based on the two networks’ features. The best way to evaluate a network is to see whether the traffic it sends your way can deliver the results you need. Even if a network surpasses the other based on some standards, it won’t matter if you don’t get the purchases you expect.

Here at Brax, you can actually test, run and manage ads on multiple networks all at the same time. Book a demo with us to see how our platform works.