Outbrain is a service that provides related content links to publishers. It is used by some news sites I frequent, and recently I’ve been annoyed by its tracking behavior. When you hover your cursor above the link, it seems like a regular, benign link, but once you click on the link, it changes to an evil tracking URL. To add to the annoyance, it is not always easy to distinguish Outbrain “ads” from legitimate links at first sight.
To end this annoyance for me, I’ve written a little Greasemonkey script. It is currently set up to work for Haaretz, Ynet, Calcalist, and TheMarker, but it should work fine for any site using Outbrain if enabled.
Download: outbrained.user.js
Thank you!! This works on cnn.com too. No more going through Outbrain just to get to a page on CNN’s website!
Uhoh, I spoke too soon. I accidentally tested it on links in the wrong section. The Tech section still has the Outbrain switcheroo going on. I do have it running on cnn.com with an @include. Any ideas? :-/ Thanks!