Outbrain?!

Yes. We received an offer from them before christmas, confirmed that they really were interested in the reviews, so now the forums are up we're giving them a test run for five days, with an eye to extending once we've gauged traffic.

It's the first 24 hours, but there have been significant teething problems, and unless these get fixed we probably won't continue long term.

 

You can stop looking, we've just turned it off. porridge, you will be delighted, as the problem is partly that it wasn't cost effective and also that the admin system has issues.

 

Outbrain support wrote back after three days, by which point we had turned off our campaign due to the persistent admin problem. The problem is still visible on the admin dashboard at the current time.

They have helpfully pointed out that we turned our campaign off, and they can turn it back on.

By contrast when we had a similar issue, Project Wonderful dropped us an answer by email in four hours with a solution.

 

Well, we have heard back from them. They've fixed it, and the content that had been removed is now live, so we're trying it for three more days. We've added more test content to see what it accepts, and how long it takes to approve it.

 

Well, after internet back and forth, it seems the teething problems are fixed. We've had significant interest in the reviews over the last four days of the test, and a lot of clicks from very high profile websites. We could have world-wide access but we've currently showing ads only in the UK to focus on our main audience.

Ideally we would actually like to keep this going. In practice, the issue long-term will be cost.

We're on a very small deal with Outbrain, and have a cap for costs, but it does still cost, and obviously the more you spend, the more promotion you get (higher CPC, so more exposure etc.).

We did wonder about allowing authors to buy through the agreement for their own content once we approve it (their rules are very strict about no affiliate links for example) or pay a contribution towards promoting their review on bookangel, but money & reviews are a bad mix. On the other hand it would be a shame to lose a chance to put indie books in front of a mass audience & our CPC is lower than most.

The club's going round in circles on this, so if anyone has any ideas, please throw them in the ring.