March 10, 2013

Israel’s content discovery platform Outbrain has acquired New York-based Visual Revenue, a company that offers tools for editors to optimize the content on their homepages.

“By merging Outbrain and Visual Revenue, we are combining the largest platform in the content discovery space with the leading platform for editorial decision support. This will offer publishers an unparalleled end-to-end solution for optimizing all of their content pages across any channel, screen size and device, with both automated and editorially-controlled solutions,” wrote Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and Founder – Visual Revenue, on the company’s blog.

The buyout of Visual Revenue is the third acquisition for Outbrain in two years. The companies did not disclose the size of the deal.

The Israeli company was founded by CEO Yaron Galai and CTO Ori Lahav in 2006. It has an R&D facility in Netanya and offices across the US and Europe. Visual Revenue was founded in New York City by Mortensen and CTO Charlie Holbech in 2011.

“We very much look forward to joining the Outbrain family, as together, we believe we can provide superior solutions that help media companies to best engage, delight and satisfy their audiences with great content. We believe this also will be one of their best long-term strategies to generate revenue,” wrote Mortensen.

Outbrain’s algorithm is set up in that it gets people to read stories they had no intention of reading.

“What we’re trying to create online is the equivalent of flipping a page of a newspaper or magazine. You had no idea what’s gonna show up, you didn’t have an expectation of specific relevancy — we’re trying to recreate that equivalent on publisher websites,” Galai told the Washington Street Journal.

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