Skimlinks Competitor YieldKit Raises $750,000 From Sedo Founder And HackFwd

Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
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YieldKit assigns affiliate links to over 20 million product offers on keywords, like product names, advertiser names and general keywords. Not unlike the Skimlinks and VigLink model, it then converts existing product links into affiliate links. That means when a user clicks and generates a sale or lead, YieldKit earns revenue, with the lion’s share going to the publisher. Today it’s announced the closing of a $750,000 Series A round with Tim Schumacher and Lars Hinrichs of European accelerator HackFwd. Online marketing expert Tim Schumacher is founder of Sedo, the domain name marketplace, and Hinrichs founded Xiing.com, “Europe’s LinkedIn” which OPO’d. The funds will be used to strengthen its position in German-speaking markets, and roll out internationally.

Part of the reason for the funding is that YieldKit says it has gained month over month revenue growth of over 50% for the last 6 consecutive months, and traction amongst publishers. “We significantly increased all relevant factors of our model in the last months, with customers earning up to 30ct eCPC and obtained various big German publishers as customers,” says Oliver Krohne, founder and CEO of YieldKit.

Schumacher reckons YieldKit has a lot of potential because users get something out of product links which go directly to the opportunity to buy the product.

YieldKit reckons it has superior technology compared to Viglinks – mainly in the US – and Skimlinks, which is working with publishers globally but mainly in the UK and US.

Last year VigLink raised $5.4 million in Series B funding from Emergence Capital, Google Ventures and First Round Capital.

Skimlinks has raised $7 million in total, latterly a Series B from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.


Company: YieldKit
Website: yieldkit.com
Launch Date: 2010

YieldKit has developed market-leading technology for publishers that offers them a new stream for automated content monetization. Since its launch in 2011 YieldKit has been monetizing a range of websites from blogs to top content publishers. YieldKit’s two products provide solutions for turning any product mention into a monetization opportunity. YieldWord assigns affiliate links to more than 20 million product offers on keywords, like product names, advertiser names and general keywords. YieldLink converts existing product links into affiliate links. Each...

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