Traffic quality and transparency

Skimlinks is bringing a new stream of revenue to publishers from what they do best: creating content that their audience will love to engage with. Publishers drive up to 25% of their revenue from Commerce.

We work with over 50% of the Top 100 US and UK publishers – including Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Conde Nast, Hearst, Yahoo!, MailOnine, and 60,000 publishers globally. Over fifteen years, Skimlinks has built a solid network of publishers who can access 48,500 merchants. Merchants choose Skimlinks for the quality of its publishers and the transparency of its reporting (Impressions, Clicks, Conversions, Order Value…).

Every day we see 4.6 billion page impressions on our network, traffic quality and transparency is at the core of our engagement with the affiliation networks and their merchants. Because Skimlinks works at scale with so many merchants, every merchant benefits from the experience and monitoring on our platform.

Before working with Skimlinks, a publisher has been manually approved by our in-house approvals team based on the quality of the content, the user experience or the region in which they operate. Skimlinks team only approves about 3% of the applications they receive, they are on the lookout for websites that have unique product focused content, that will add value to both merchants and users in the region that they operate.

In rare circumstances when a merchant would need more granular control over the publishers on their program, Skimlinks has the ability to put certain publishers on a blocklist from their program. This can be requested through this link.

When signing up publishers have to accept our Program Policies. We made it short and in plain English, which makes it unambiguous and easy to enforce. Once a publisher is approved and live on our platform, the Network Quality team use our proprietary tools to constantly monitor all traffic and detect any suspect activity. If a publisher has engaged in a practice that violates our policy, they are notified, and appropriate action is taken e.g suspension and removal from the Skimlinks Network.

Publishers have to follow our guidelines on both content and traffic sources:

Content Guidelines

We do not allow publishers with the following types of content to use Skimlinks:

• Pornographic content
• Violent or hateful content
• Content of a religious nature
• Content of a political nature
• Content that promotes illegal activity
• Content that specifically targets children aged 13 and below
• Duplicated content from other websites

It is a breach of our Program Policies to:

• Use search engine marketing in order to bid on merchant’s brand terms and generate affiliate revenues through Skimlinks.
• Alter through redirection or other means the http referrer.
• Generate impressions, clicks, or transactions through any means other than those initiated by non incentivized end users.
• Use a domain name containing merchant or other entities’ names, brands or trademarks, or misspellings thereof.
• Operate multiple accounts without express written consent from Skimlinks.
• Engage in ‘direct linking’.
• Be non compliant with all applicable United States Federal Trade Commission and UK Advertising Standards Authority guidelines, including those regarding how implied endorsements and testimonials like affiliate marketing must be disclosed to consumers (see, for example, some relevant information here and here).
• Be non compliant with the IAB Voucher Code Of Conduct or the relevant Network and / or Merchant terms
• Create the impression that your website is the website of a Merchant or other entity, including, without limitation, framing or copying of a website in any manner or creating banners or advertisements that mimic a Merchant or other entity’s website’s search, display, or social ads in any manner.
• Purchase advertisements that direct to your site(s) that could be considered as competing with a Merchant’s ads including, without limitation, the purchase or use of Product Listing Ads
• Use Skimlinks affiliate tracking tags outside of Skimlinks technologies
• Be an entity registered in a country that has economic sanctions and export control laws and regulations of the UK, United States, EU, Israel and, as applicable, other jurisdictions upon it