Outbrain announces expansion of strategic partnership with Microsoft

Outbrain has announced the expansion of its global partnership with Microsoft encompassing business, technology and services.

The expansion of the partnership will include a multi-year Azure engagement to further enable the fast-paced innovation of Outbrain's media platform.

Outbrain has been a long-standing partner of Microsoft through technology and advertising integrations that span MSN, Microsoft 365, Xbox, gaming, and Microsoft Bing

The recommendation platform serves 1 billion consumers worldwide with over 10 billion recommendations and ads daily, generating more than 1.5 million engagements per hour spanning over 7,000 media partners.

Through a new multi-year strategic partnership, Outbrain aims to leverage Azure to further its global expansion, accelerate development cycles and improve connectivity between advertisers and publishers, particularly with Outbrain’s programmatic bidders. 

This will continue to drive forward the partnership through continuous innovation, enhancing Outbrain’s extensive data estate with a rich set of tools and services, ultimately helping Outbrain’s customers improve their business outcomes.

David Kostman, co-CEO of Outbrain said: "We're excited to further expand our strategic partnership with Microsoft. We share the mission of supporting independent journalism and the open web.

"Over the course of the last decade, we have worked together to serve publishers and advertisers with high quality solutions across the globe. Extending our partnership with Microsoft to include Microsoft Azure technology as part of our hybrid cloud platform will drive innovation and deepen the relationship between our companies," he added.

Andrew Burke, managing director, APAC and Growth Markets (India, China, Brazil) of Outbrain said: "This partnership represents another significant milestone in our efforts to provide innovative solutions to publishers and advertisers in our local markets."

Tara Brady, corporate vice president of strategic partnerships at Microsoft said: "Outbrain is recognised across the industry as a scalable and highly resilient platform for both publishers and advertisers.

"We are pleased to expand our established partnership and look forward to partnering with Outbrain’s technology teams as they leverage Microsoft Azure’s most advanced technologies to service their customers," he added.

Vice President, Microsoft Advertising, Rob Wilk said: "Outbrain has been an important and growing part of our ecosystem since 2012."

"The company’s focus on delivering innovative advertising products and programmatic solutions has helped expand our business in several areas over the last few years. We’ve been impressed by Outbrain’s platform, scale, and technology and are pleased to see Outbrain embrace Microsoft Azure and look forward to how it will improve performance for advertisers in Microsoft’s growing advertising ecosystem and on the open web," he added.

Read more: Outbrain releases Engagement Bid Strategy