Paid Discovery Services Get Picky, Require Paid Content Sites to Improve Subjective Quality

I recently wrote about paid discovery sites that make it easier for paid content sites to promote their content on other sites. But this

I recently wrote about paid discovery sites that make it easier for paid content sites to promote their content on other sites.But this weekend, when I attended the Financial Publishers Roundtable in Austin, TX, there were rumors that one of the paid discovery providers, OutBrain, was going to ban all financial services publications.However, the truth is a bit more subtle. While OutBrain’s content guidelines state that the company reserves the right to block content from “Financial Services,” OutBrain’s VP of global marketing Lisa LaCour informed me that the company is retaining TheStreet.com as a client.”In the financial and health categories, there’s a lot of badly produced content that send users down a rabbit hole and into a purchasing funnel,” LaCour stated. The company is looking to avoid that sort of negative user experience. Therefore, they are banning content that “encourages high risk investments or money making schemes with the intention of profiting off user participation in such practices” and “stock trading or financial services (with very limited exception).”This exception is obviously subjective (much like the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity). But there are some more specific guidelines — paid content sites should avoid:

  • grammatical errors
  • grainy images
  • poor design
  • misleading headlines
  • calls-t0-action in headlines
  • SEO-focused content that links back to low-quality content to boost SEO or had hidden text and links

LaCour said that the site will link to paywall sites, however the actually link should lead to some content that’s free to view, not just a hard paywall. In other words, article previews with a paywall conversion funnel at the bottom are fine, but article summaries for a hard paywall are not.Given the subjectivity in discerning high-quality from low-quality content, it would behoove paid content sites to initiate and nurture a working relationship with paid discovery services. At the Financial Publisher’s Roundtable discussion, some sites complained about how they were thrown off Google AdWords, but other sites have been able to continue using the service by continually talking to Google and even re-explaining their content and purpose every time they get a new provider team.

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