I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better. Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content, but until th

I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better. Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content, but until the world finds a successful way for people to pay up for what they enjoy it's what the industry has to work with. That out of the way I have a few issues with this piece. 1. Ranjan did an interesting thing that chum purveyors like us do all the time. He lead the article with a disturbing screenshot of the lowest piece of crap chum he could find. That draws you in to read more because who wouldn't stare at a train wreck right? What he didn't say is that the screenshot he showed isn't an Outbrain widget. In fact almost every recommendation in that widget breaks Outbrain's content guidelines (https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/ https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/) and would be removed from our network. Tying those ads to Outbrain is not accurate. 2. The block of chum below the first one, with the 5G and such? Yeah totally Outbrain. Ranjan went through all the ads there and found none of them are harmful. Yeah some are vapid entertainment, one is a nonsensical link to a dying search engine, but a few of them gasp are actually useful. Somehow though the fact that people make money off of advertising is bad. 3. None of either example are worse than what you would find in the back pages of Psychology Today or Popular Science back in the day. Those publishers were as responsible for those ads back then as WaPo is for the chum at the bottom of its articles today. If you read our content guidelines you'll see that Outbrain takes that responsibility seriously. We're guests on our publishers' pages and we never forget that. I think this article could have gone a whole lot deeper into the terrifying world of ad arbitrage, programmatic buying, behavioral tracking, GDPR skirting, etc. and it would have been more meaningful, but the fact that it is complaining that these chum buckets are as bad as display advertising in the magazine era isn't really saying anything new.