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