Skimlinks launches SkimWords to turn more links into an affiliate revenue opportunity

Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has launched its latest product that aims to make it even easier for publishers to place revenue generating affiliate links in their content.

Dubbed SkimWords, the feature, which is currently in beta, differs slightly from the company’s main offering. Rather than simply converting existing retailer links to affiliate links on-the-fly, it looks at the page’s content and converts any references to known products into fairly non-obtrusive geo-targeted links to retailer sites where the item can be purchased.

The fact that these links are location-aware – at the country level – is perhaps noteworthy since it accommodates a site’s international traffic and therefore hopefully doesn’t leave much money on the table.

Skimlinks has been testing SkimWords with existing clients including, ITProPortal, AV Forums and Anglersnet for about a month and claims that in these publisher trials its seen the number of pages that can generate revenue jump by 300 per cent. That’s, of course, the number of pages that can potentially be monetized through affiliate links, not the actual click-through rate, while it’s also not clear how well links of this nature, which could be perceived as spam, will be accepted by readers.

On that note, SkimLinks says that all dynamically created links, although formatted in the same link style as organic links, “utilize a disclosure tooltip on mouse-over, to implicitly communicate in an non-intrusive way that the link has the potential to generate revenue for the publisher.” That at least obeys the most important rule of publishing on the web: disclosure.

Last December we reported that SkimLinks had raised $1.5m in a Series A round led by Sussex Place Ventures, along with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and The Accelerator Group and a number of the original angel investors involved in the company’s seed round earlier in the year.