Outbrain.com ads - How to remove

Outbrain.com online advertiser is a private company, founded in 2006. It uses behavioral targeting to show personalized content like photos, videos, articles and other promotional material. In many ways, the platform is similar to Taboola. It is very difficult for such advertising platforms to keep their content relevant and spam-free. Outbrain.com service has frequently received criticism for the quality of its content.

In 2014, a popular Fortune magazine dished out the truth about Outbrain, explaining that it has serious problems with spam and most of its clients are spreading annoying scams (Outbrain Reception). Furthermore, there are a lot more negative sides of this advertising company and you should learn all of them.

Outbrain.com ads are full of click-bait articles, fake news and online scams

There have been reports, suggesting that Outbrain.com service is being promoted thru shady browser add-ons. Despite the fact that the official website looks clean and professional, we have noticed that people are not particularly willing to sign up for Outbrain services. In one comment, a person suggested this:

“I would recommend using other channels to promote your content – Outbrain should be a last resort. Social media is probably a better way to promote your content”.

In addition to this negative comment, we have also found out that the Outbrain.com can be involved in scams. For instance, users have reported to receive deceptive letters from the official email address of Outbrain. Most of them are designed to get users’ banking account information or to promote the ad-service in general. However, spam is not the proper way to do it. Here is an example of one deceptive message:

“Hi there!
Unfortunately, the credit card that we have on file for has declined, and we had to temporarily disable your account. So, please, update your card info thru email [email protected] to enable your account”.

It has become clear that most of the Outbrain.com ads will feature click-bait articles. This is a devious attempt to rack up page views by displaying fake news and ads. Therefore, Outbrain.com virus will force the Internet surfers to notice such ads like “13 Ways To Get a Flat Stomach” or “10 Celebrities Who Are Very Mean” (While We are Going After Fake News, How About Ad Scams, Too?). Such clearly-fake articles should no longer trigger people’s reaction, but they still do. Also, Outbrain.com was one of the ad-servers that showed the notorious (and fake) ad for an article called “These Bill Clinton Facts Will Change Your Opinion of the Clintons” (We need to talk about the internets fake ads problem).

Outbrain.com ads have also showed some articles about crypto-currencies. They have caused people like Tom Frewen to write complaints about the recommended content. Frewed explained that the sponsored ads on websites were rogue. He noticed click-bait stories like “If you bought $100 of bitcoins 7 years ago, you’d be sitting on $145.8 million now after new record high”. In the articles, people are tempted to join the craze of cryptocurrencies by following instructions for investing in Bitcoin (Press Council issues decision on complaint over Bitcoin fake stories). Investments in crypto-currencies are very risky: you could lose all your money in a second.

If you are still thinking about joining the Outbrain.com service, look at a few more comments about the service:

“In my experience, they overcharge. Be very, very careful with this company. They charged me many times more-per-click than my order. Work with them at your own risk.

I don’t want Outbrain.com to monitor my Internet usage. But according to their company rep, Ms Walder, I’m stuck with it. If I opt out, all it does is stop them from sending me recommendations specifically tailored to my interests. They will still append generic recommendations to my IE pages. They shouldn’t be able to do this.

I’ve created campaigns in Twitter, Google, FB and others and never saw a worse interface or lousier UX than this site”.

How to deal with unwanted Outbrain ads?

We found information about custom ad blockers that are supposed to ban advertisements from Outbrain. If you decide to do this, the widgets from the advertisers won’t be displayed again. However, it might be convenient to run a scan with an anti-malware tool to make sure that none of the Ads by Outbrain.com introduced you to malware-laden content. By clicking on rogue articles, you could be transmitted to websites that will automatically install viruses or crypto-miners. Therefore, please use Spyhunter to detect all malicious viruses in your computer device.

Automatic Malware removal tools