Times have never been tougher in the publishing world with print sales down and advertising revenues hit.
Titles have been meeting the digital challenge by extending their offerings online, opening up a whole new world of opportunity for advertising streams.
For those unaware of how the publishing industry functions, let’s fill you in. There’s always been a tight relationship between merchant PRs and editorial.
PRs supply information and products to publications that they think will be relevant to their target readership, helping out busy newsdesks. In turn trusted editorial endorsement and coverage helps drive sales.
But what if publishers themselves were able to take a slice of the profits of the sales generated on the back of their editorial coverage?
That’s where the services from a recently launched company come in. Affiliate network aggregator, Skimlinks, is fast extending its services to content sites, blogs, web applications and social networks.
Publishers already signed up include Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail online), and Future (T3.com) as well as number of fashion and lifestyle independents. An added incentive to sign-up, the service is currently free to use.
Skimlinks was established by London-based entrepreneur Alicia Navarro and works by converting online editorial links into affiliate links when users click on them. Journalists create content as normal, with links to merchant's products and services, and Skimlinks does all the hard work of turning these links into affiliate links on-the-fly.
With more than 10,000 affiliate programmes in place, the links are converted into affiliate links automatically when they are clicked.
Clients benefit from a centralised system which reports across 19 affiliate networks, showing what readers click on and buy.
And to encourage click-through, natural links are turned into affiliate links only when they are clicked. They do not look suspicious as traditional affiliate links do to users.
Skimlinks also allows publishers to send users to any merchant URL and still earn commissions on sales, regardless of whether they support deeplinking or not.
So is this end of editorial impartiality with readers faced with a future of advertorial? Not so, according to the Daily Mail online.
“We often send very high volumes of traffic to sites we write about but we have no way of monetising that,” a representative from the newspaper told us.
“The way this works, by automatically creating an affiliate link, allows us to link while maintaining editorial impartiality.”
Over at Future, a spokesman said, “Future’s online advertising revenues continue to grow at a healthy rate and Skimlinks will be an important tool to drive additional digital revenue streams on our sites.
“Skimlinks enables Future to benefit from the best affiliate deals, whilst our users get straight to the products and offers they want."
Looks like a win-win situation in our books.
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