Slick pre­sen­ta­tion but you could chal­lenge almost every­thing she says. If affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing is dif­fi­cult why is the inter­net awash with it? She’s pas­sion­ate about edi­to­r­ial integrity, she claims, but wants edi­tors to be paid com­mis­sion for sell­ing other people’s stuff. What? How can you be agnos­tic when you have to sell prod­uct to get paid? What mag­a­zine edi­tors do, appar­ently, is receive prod­uct from make-up brands and when they write about make-up ‘they use the brands they’ve got there’. No. That’s not what edi­to­r­ial is, or what edi­tors do. She says her prod­uct is well suited to par­ent­ing sites like ivil­lage. Why? The FTC has a prob­lem with mom blog­gers receiv­ing free prod­uct, why will it like pay­ments the reader can­not see? Next time I read ivil­lage and it rec­om­mends foods for my baby is that the brand pay­ing the high­est com­mis­sion, am I being told what I need to know for the well being of my baby or what the ‘edi­tor’ needs to tell me in order to sell the prod­uct and get paid ? Naive to ignore the incen­tive of com­mis­sion. Con­tex­tual affil­i­ate links mean less adver­tis­ing? Retail­ers say affil­i­ate links are adverts, the retailer pro­vides the code and con­trols the link, an edi­to­r­ial link is one con­trolled by the publisher.

Thanks for your feed­back, Mead­ow­peier.
The inter­net is awash with affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing and I agree that there is a chal­lenge to retain edi­to­r­ial integrity while earn­ing com­mis­sions for prod­ucts, so we run work­shops for our pub­lish­ers with sug­ges­tions on how to do this: there are a vari­ety of tech­niques and processes, but the under­ly­ing mes­sage is that in the long term your read­ers will react badly if you always give prod­ucts you are affil­i­ated with a pos­i­tive review, so stay true to your audi­ence and mes­sage regard­less of what retail­ers are pay­ing com­mis­sions. It’s a tricky bal­ance, I know, but it is achiev­able. Also, because Skim­links cre­ate the affil­i­ate links after the con­tent has been writ­ten, it is pos­si­ble for edi­tors to be agnos­tic as to what links are mon­e­tised.
We are aware of the FTC rul­ing, which is why in our T&Cs we man­date that pub­lish­ers add a dis­clo­sure notice in an appro­pri­ate area on their site, and why we talk very openly and pas­sion­ately about dis­clo­sure and trans­parency.
I agree that when the retailer pro­vides the code this makes it an ad, but in this case, it is the pub­lisher that decides what links to add, and what to say about them, so they are not tra­di­tional adverts, but edi­to­r­ial that is rewarded if there are sales. I agree this is debat­able, but it is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion.
I really appre­ci­ate your com­ments.
Ali­cia Navarro
CEO — Skimlinks

Ali­cia, thanks for adding some addi­tional tex­ture and back­ground to the sub­ject. We’re just at the begin­ning of this, yes?, and can adjust the tech­nolo­gies and inter­nal poli­cies to make it work for us. A tricky bal­ance, to be sure, but one that can be achieved with the right stan­dards and the right peo­ple look­ing after the read­ers’ interests.

I think Skim­links offers an excit­ing new rev­enue poten­tial to a wide vari­ety of small, mid­size and large online pub­lish­ers. Let’s keep an eye out to make sure they ful­fill their com­mit­ment to serve the public’s interest.

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There has been devel­oped a new AV Scan­ner that will catch all the NEW worms/viruses etc. Even if they arent detected. You should check it out, to be on the safe side.

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[…] the bon­net I can’t com­ment on how well they man­age to con­vert their traf­fic, but accord­ing to Skim­links (who pro­vide auto­mated con­tex­tual affil­i­ate links to Mail Online and oth­ers) there are larger sites […]

Nice arti­cle, thanks!