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Chat With Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro on Skimkit Launch
Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.
This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.
We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.
Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.
The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.
The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.
Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.
Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.
[...] out our interview with Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro from earlier this year. Read More: affiliate revenue, blogs, Skimbit, Skimlinks EBcitation [...]
[...] Allen Stern | March 9th, 2010 | view entire article [...]
This is not your usual critical reporting if you don’t mind me saying. You have told us the up side which is great but what about the risks? Signing up through Skimlinks means you are dependent on them to be paid. You agree to Skimlink’s terms and the retailer’s terms. What hapens when the retailer says Skimlinks/affiliates have broken their terms, say by not disclosing their use of Skimlinks, and refuses to pay out?
I can see that happening a lot as retailers are not going to sit back and see entire forums made up of user generated content where they have lots of word of mouth links turned into affiliate links overnight that they have to start paying for.
The other point I had was that some affiliates say they are using Skimlinks to earn off Amazon when their location in say North Carolina or Colorado. Skimlinks is based in the UK and so you sign up to them and they sign up to Amazon’s associates program and pay you. Does this work? It seems quite a good work around and Amazon has seemed to suggest that in states where the retailer has sacked all its affiliates, it is still working with affiliates in other states and is still selling to customers in states where it has no affiliates. However, if it is against Amazon’s terms there’s no point in doing it as you will not be paid. Would be interested in what experiences affiliates have had.
Hi S M Cane,
You raise very worthwhile points. Let me give you some of our findings on your concerns.
Regarding the sales tax law – we have consulted lawyers on this and its still a very tricky area. What we have concluded is that the law says merchants that have a contractual relationship with an affiliate based in the US state have to collect sales tax for all sales that occur in that US state. However, in our case, merchants have a contractual relationship with us, and we are not based in that US state.
We have contractual relationships with our publishers, but the nature of this relationship, as per our terms of service, is that we pay publishers to put our code on their site, and our publishers do not have a direct contractual relationship with the merchant, nor do they ever actually put an affiliate link on their site. They are agnostic as to what links we can convert into affiliate links, so they are not acting as the merchant’s affiliates by intent or action. That being said, the lawyer did say that there was some ambiguity to how it could be interpreted, and certainly its possible the wording of the law could be tightened to exclude our scenario too, but at the moment, our understanding and belief is that we are not operating illegally or in breach of anyone’s ToS.
With regards to the history of our payments to publishers, we have been operating successfully and in close tandem with every affiliate network and merchant for 18 months, and have not had any concern raised yet, nor any publisher refused payment by a network. In fact, conversely, we are warmly endorsed by networks and merchants, by bringing quality content sites into affiliate marketing, and creatign an ecoysystem where publishers add outbound links to their content more often. Disclosure is an important process, and it is in our terms of service that publishers disclose their use of Skimlinks/affiliate marketing on their site in an appropriate way. There has not been any reported incident yet of a merchant not paying out to affiliates because they did not disclose, and the legislation is likely to target merchants that push free products in exchange for positive reviews, rather than publishers running affiliatization services like Skimlinks after they have written their normal content.
We take much pride in operating transparently to all parties, we value ethics and integrity highly, and encourage disclosure and objectivity on publisher sites. It is a new area with new legislation, we are just trying to define the best code of conduct and encourage our publishers to abide by it.
Hope that answers some of your concerns? Please feel free to contact us if you have further questions?
Alicia Navarro
CEO – Skimlinks