Outbrain Agency Account: How Review, Budgets and Billing Work

Outbrain doesn't sell anything under that name.

• Contracts with agencies. Outbrain's Advertising Guidelines describe the standards "applicable to any advertiser or agency partners" who have contracted with the Outbrain Group.
• One Owner, several roles. Each Amplify account has four user roles: Owner, Admin, Campaign manager and Viewer. There's only one external Owner, and each account also has an Outbrain account manager with Owner-level permissions.
• Managed accounts. Some categories run only on what Outbrain calls managed accounts, and advertisers outside its supported regions may qualify for one if they're ready to spend a set amount each month, which varies by country.

To run campaigns you need at least Campaign manager. Ask which role you're getting before anyone sends the invite, because a Viewer can't touch a campaign.

For a buyer, yes. Outbrain bought Teads in February 2025, and on June 9, 2025 the company completed its rename from Outbrain Inc. to Teads Holding Co. The press release says the change "will not impact current stockholders, contracts, or operations."

On the advertiser side the Outbrain name is still everywhere. The guidelines open by saying Outbrain is "operating under the Teads brand", and the site describes Outbrain Direct Response as a subsidiary of the new Teads. The help pages still talk about the Amplify dashboard, and the buying page offers Amplify or the DSP of your choice.

One thing to watch. Teads keeps its own Ad policies page, which applies to "Teads inventory" and doesn't mention Outbrain. It says cryptocurrency is "prohibited at this time on the Teads network". Outbrain's guidelines, which do name the Outbrain Group, leave a narrow door open for crypto on managed accounts. For an Amplify campaign, read Outbrain's guidelines. If someone offers you Teads inventory, read Teads' page.

Only businesses in Outbrain's listed countries. It sets two lists, one for where the account can be based and one for where the card can come from, and both pages were last modified in August 2023.

The lists aren't the same. Bulgaria, Puerto Rico and the United Arab Emirates appear on the card list but not on the regions list, and Outbrain doesn't explain the gap. India, Turkey and Mexico aren't on either. If your business is outside the regions list, Outbrain's own answer is its managed account option, with a monthly spend that varies by country.

The account's currency follows its location. Outbrain supports four for card payments: EUR in the EU, GBP in the UK, BRL in Brazil and USD everywhere else. You don't pick it.

Outbrain charges per click. The default is what it calls automatic billing: as your campaign spends, Outbrain charges your card in round amounts. Its example is a campaign that spends $230 in a few minutes and gets charged $200 right away. If the charge succeeds you keep spending. If it fails, Outbrain disables the account immediately.

Outbrain's system disables an account automatically for three reasons.

1. A failed threshold payment.
2. A failed invoice payment.
3. An expired credit card.

To get back, open the Payments tab, fix the billing details and press Retry. Outbrain says reactivation can take up to 10 minutes, and asks you not to press Retry again in that time, to avoid duplicate charges. That page dates from December 2020, so check the dashboard if it looks different.

Outbrain's two pages don't say whether the prepayment fee is the same card fee or an extra one.

The surcharges follow where the ad served, not where you targeted. Outbrain says a campaign that doesn't target the UK can still show there, that it won't refund surcharges on legitimate traffic, and that you should exclude a country explicitly if you don't want it.

There's a second route, prepayment. You send money before the campaign runs, by wire, ACH in the US, SEPA in the EU or card. Outbrain says you reach it through your account manager, or through its Customer Success team, which checks eligibility for self-serve users. ACH payments take a few days to land, and only dollars go through ACH and only euros through SEPA. On prepayment or invoice billing you can't edit the payment information yourself, only the contact address and billing email.

The same on every account, agency or not. Outbrain's budget page, modified July 2026, sets three budget types.

Outbrain's own example on the campaign budget is $50 over three days, which the system won't save because the minimum for three days is $60. A third pacing option, Daily Target, lets you set a daily amount inside a monthly or campaign budget, and Outbrain warns that actual spend can beat that target by up to 35%.

Two more things cost money past your budget. When a budget caps, people can still click ads that were already served, so you may be charged up to 20% more than your budget. And clicks can keep landing after you pause a campaign by hand.

For bids, Outbrain's campaign creation guide, modified October 2023, recommends a starting CPC between $0.65 and $0.85 for traffic campaigns, and a starting daily budget of at least $100 to $150 for any campaign. Those are recommendations to gather data, not minimums the system enforces. Taboola's minimums and fees, for comparison, are in our piece on Taboola advertising costs.

Every piece of content goes through review before it runs, and Outbrain keeps the right to reject or block content even after launch. The review page, modified September 2022, sets out the steps.

1. You submit. A new campaign shows "Inactive – Not Delivering" while it waits in the queue, and its ads show "Content Pending".
2. Outbrain reviews. It aims for 1 business day, Monday to Friday, and says longer content can take up to 3 days.
3. A rejection comes by email with the reasons. You can reply asking for detail, and Outbrain says it answers within 1 to 3 business days.
4. You fix and resubmit. Select the edited ads, open the Actions menu and choose Resubmit.

Step 4 doesn't always exist. Outbrain's list of rejection reasons, modified July 2023, marks many of them "No" for resubmission. Those include a link to a PDF, high-risk financial products, adult content, gambling on an account that isn't managed, and headlines judged inaccurate or misleading. A wrong URL needs new or duplicated ads. Sensational headlines, grammar, capitalization and most image problems can be fixed and resubmitted.

The landing page gets checked as hard as the ad. Outbrain's guidelines ask for:

• a Contact Us section with a real email, phone number or address, not just an empty form
• a physical address on financial landing pages
• "Advertisement" or "Advertorial" clearly at the top of advertorials
• affiliate sites that disclose any financial relationship with the advertiser
• an Impressum for pages promoted in Germany, Austria or Switzerland
• no fake testimonials, fake comments, auto-refreshing dates or countdown clocks for offers that don't expire

Outbrain's crawler also has to reach the page. Its compatibility guide asks for a live URL returning status 200, Outbrain's IPs and user agents allow-listed, and a title meta tag, without which the page can't be used as a landing page at all.

Outbrain's guidelines split categories into prohibited and restricted.

Outbrain's own pages don't fully agree with each other on categories.

Where they disagree, work to the stricter page until Outbrain confirms otherwise. Either way, on a self-serve account the answer is no.

An agency account removes your card from the chain, which is the part of Outbrain billing that breaks most easily. It doesn't remove the review, the guidelines or the categories that need Outbrain's own verification. An agency can't verify you for gambling or CFDs. Outbrain's team does that.

Two smaller things move with the Owner. Promotional credits from Outbrain need a payment method entered first, are non-transferable and apply only to future costs, so a coupon stays on the account it was redeemed on. Only the Owner, or an Outbrain team member, can change the Owner. On your own account, if the Owner leaves your company, Outbrain's account manager or DIY Success Team assigns a new one.

Outbrain works on red flags. Its guidelines say breaking them brings red flag warnings by email, and that repeat or severe violations "may result in your account, content and/or campaigns being suspended or banned" from the network, at any time and at Outbrain's sole discretion. The guidelines don't say how many flags make a ban.

Closing an account has its own rule. Outbrain asks you to disable every campaign first, then request cancellation or delete the account from the Payments tab, and says any remaining open balances are charged at the end of the month.

On an agency account, both of those land with the provider first. When one of ours falls, you hear it from a person, with what the platform told us. We read why it happened, fix what can be fixed and resubmit with you. If the account can’t come back and the platform’s rules allow a new one, you get it at no charge. A new account won't carry a rejected offer through review, though, because the guidelines and the reviewers are the same. What happens to money sitting on a banned account is covered in can an agency ad account get banned, and what happens to your balance.

Native on Outbrain is one of the things we run. Your rate depends on vertical and volume, and comes in chat before your first deposit.

An agency account on Outbrain is for the buyer whose card is the weak point. You still run the ads, and Outbrain's billing sits with the provider whose account it is. How you'd pay us for it is a question for the chat. If you pay by card from a listed country and a declined charge wouldn't hurt your month, stay on your own Outbrain account.

Requests and top ups on Outbrain run in the Adtucon Platform, like on every other platform we run. The Adtucon Platform is in early access with a first group of clients. It opens to every client in early 2027. Your manager has a name and a Telegram, and we work with 400+ client teams. Working in a managed-account category? Say so in the first message.

If you're weighing the two big native networks, our guide to Taboola agency ad accounts covers the other one.

Five questions for Outbrain in particular. The general list is in questions to ask an agency ad account provider.

1. Who is the Owner of the Amplify account, and which role will I get?
2. Which country and currency is the account based in?
3. Who pays Outbrain, and what happens to my campaigns if that payment fails?
4. My category needs a managed account. Is this one, and who talks to Outbrain's team about verification?
5. What happens to my unspent balance if the account is closed, and where is that written?

Then name your category, your geos and your landing, and see how our Outbrain accounts work.