This is David, COO of Outbrain – thanks so much for trialing our OutLoud program. We appreciate the feedback, it’s always very useful as we develop our product line.

A couple of points about how we distribute articles and how they perform you may find useful. Articles submitted to OutLoud are targeted in areas contextually similar to them. So articles about widely read topics may get higher overall impessions than articles focused on more niche areas of interest. If multiple articles are substantively about the same thing, they will often share impression volume and you’ll see similar levels of distribution.

In terms of clicks and CTR, we see very large differences due to the title of the article. For instance, PR oriented titles that simply “announce” usually attract a lower number of clickers than directed titles that really “engage” people. Looking at the two articles you submitted, it seems one big difference is that one article has ~8X the click through rate of the other — this is very much in line with what we see elsewhere. We see swings of 0.01% to 2% depending on the article, so a 200x difference . Which titles do well? It’s really not rocket science… when we step back as people (not data munchers) and read titles in the absence of any more information about the article, it’s pretty easy to predict which one people are going to think is interesting and click. Our world is not an SEO world – titles don’t need to be heavy with the right keywords, they need to be interesting and catchy.

Hope this helps explains things a bit, and thanks again for giving us a try!

Ann – if you, or any of your readers, have any further questions about Outbrain and how our services can work for you, please ask them in the comments below or head to our support forum at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/outbrain