By Alexander Taub, Contributor

On January 17th, 2013, I wrote a post on my this blog about a company called Yesware. I had been using their tool for a few weeks and was really impressed with it. I wrote one of my last articles on the benefits of using their product, and didn’t think more about it. But I noticed that the pageviews number was increasing more rapidly than normal. I looked at the numbers they were at 25k pageviews, then 50k, then 100k, and now over two months later, over 250k. I was perplexed. I emailed Matthew Bellows, the CEO of Yesware to ask him what was going on: I knew they had some investors who tweeted it out, like Brad Feld. Maybe that was it. Nope. Instead, they were using two Israeli companies, Outbrain and Taboola, to get the article more distribution. These two leaders in the content marketing space or as I like to call it, AdSense for content, have a simple offering that you’ve probably seen but don’t even know about. Combined, they power the “other content you may like” next to every article on every big publication ranging from Time, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and more. Outbrain and Taboola only recently started going after the same deals. Outbrain is coming from the contextual text side, whereas Taboola comes from the videos-you-may-like side. They only recently built the other side of the offering that steps into the “others” territory. But this piece is not about comparing them to see who is better. Rather, it is about the space of content marketing, why it is the next big thing, and how you are missing out big time if you are not pushing your content into the marketplace. A little more about how the space works: you have two options as a content creator and blog/site owner. The first is to add a widget on your blog to host “other content you may like” and get paid to push people to good content. The second is to get your content pushed into the marketplace and have it appear on “other content you may like” for other outlets ranging from big to small sites. The first side you get paid, the second side you set an amount per click and a budget. The interesting thing here is that both companies have convinced huge content creators, like The New York Times, CNN, and Time that it is worthwhile to link people off their site. Think about that? They are linking people to other content sites. That either means Outbrain and Taboola have killer sales people (which they probably do), or they can prove that linking people to good content will make them more money than a standard ad banner. That’s where this becomes dangerous and a real threat to Google AdSense. If you have a personal blog, how much would you pay to get a few thousand more views a month? $5? $10? Content marketing allows you to do this. Now …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest