CANNES – Time was, New York-based Outbrain mostly helped news site readers find interesting stories to read on other news sites. Now that any brand can be a news outlet, however, Outbrain is finding a growing content customer base amongst marketers, too.

“We are just enjoying this huge uptake in content marketing that brands are getting in to,” strategy SVP Gilad de Vries told Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions advertiser conflab.

“Brands are becoming publishers, creating truly great content that has true value – whether it’s information or entertainment value, it’s not advertising. We help their content to be discovered by brand publishers like the CNNs of this world.”

de Vries says Outbrain deploys over 40 algorithms so that, when a reader of a news story reaches the bottom, they are shown links to news articles, either on-site or elsewhere, deemed to be relevant to the user. By making their own attractive content, brands can be inserted in to this slot on news sites via Outbrain.

“Right after the article that’s when they expect to get a recommendation for the next thing they might be interested in,” de Vries says. “If a piece of content doesn’t perform, it’s out.” Next stop, new Outbrain technology will let editors serve up packages of such content in to their editorial stream, the company told Journalism.co.uk.