Audiences by Skimlinks will reward publishers for content contribution with audience targeting tools
Skimlinks, the content monetisation platform for online publishers, has launched a new service intended to reward media owners for their data contribution to the platform with new audience targeting services.
"Audiences by Skimlinks" will help advertisers better target potential customers by giving them greater insights into browsing, clicking and conversion data of the 1.3bn billion unique users engaging with content across the Skimlinks publisher network.
The network is made up of a 55,000-strong publisher network including Time Inc, Mail Online and The Independent.
The programmatic audience targeting service will automatically share revenues with publisher partners based on their contribution to the Skimlinks’ data cooperative. This will give brands and agencies a better understanding of the shopping behaviours of their readers allowing them to inform their content creation strategies, grow their readership, attract new advertiser partnerships and optimize ad yields.
Alicia Navarro, chief executive and co-founder of Skimlinks, said the company had been “observing the increasing power that platforms such as Facebook and Google have due to their scale” and were “concerned about what that means for independent content creators as they try to negotiate advertising terms or understand the broader shopping intent of their audience”.
“It's about giving power to the publishers, so they stand a chance against the power of the platforms,” continued Navarro.
She promised publishers “that are part of our co-operative will benefit both with data revenues and audience insights, in ways that they couldn't achieve on their own”.
Jo Holdaway, who is the director of strategic and commercial data at Skimlinks partner ESI Media – the commercial department for the Evening Standard, The Independent and i, said: “Advertisers and publishers have needed to work closer to better understand how content drives and influences sales much further up the funnel” and added “now our audience data can reflect this”.
She added that “by working as part of Skimlinks' collective of media owners - from large publishers like us to community forums and independent bloggers - we all benefit from a broader and deeper dataset, both in our own understanding of audience behaviours and our proposition to advertisers”.
Skimlinks’ publisher network spans over 1.5m websites globally, which yields the capture of purchase intent signals from more than 1.3 billion unique users every month. The tech is used to automatically monetise their commerce-related content by rewarding publishers for any sales they send to a Skimlinks retailer partner.