• by Sara Guaglione , November 27, 2019

Outbrain, the content discovery and recommendation platform, is renewing its partnership with Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), which operates multiple media businesses in print, digital, radio and other platforms in Asia.

The multi-year partnership began in 2013. SPH will continue to use Outbrain’s Smartfeed technology, which provides a content discovery feed that allows publishers to personalize the experience for audiences to improve engagement and revenue. 

Smartfeed is designed for a range of content, including promoted articles, editorial and video.

“Together, we are focused on driving strategic and sustainable growth across the regions and platforms,” stated Chris Mockford, head of publishers, APAC at Outbrain. “Our renewed partnership will allow us to extend our presence not only in [Southeast Asia] but also into China across SPH’s Chinese-language sites.”

SPH publishes 17 newspaper titles in four languages, and more than 80 magazine titles in the region.

This week, Outbrain also released a study with research agency Lumen on consumers’ trust in advertising on publishers' news sites.

The study found native ads shown on "premium" news sites in the UK, France and Germany are more likely to be trusted (+31%), clicked on (+16%) and lead to future purchases (+18%) than ads that appear on social-media platforms. 

The study draws on responses of 900+ consumers in those three markets.

When comparing native recommendations to social and display ads, respondents found native ads 62% easier to understand than display ads and 31% easier than social ads, according to the study.

Ads shown on premium news sites are 44% more likely to be trusted than those on social sites. Native recommendations are 27% more trusted than social ads.

Last month, Taboola agreed to buy Outbrain, its competition in the content-recommendation platform space, for $250 million in cash and 30% of the new company.

Outbrain is known for the "Other stories from around the Web" recommendations at the bottom of articles. 

The company’s content-discovery platform surfaces sponsored content to users from across the web or from publishers' own networks, with videos and stories that can be tailored to specific audiences.