Our greatest hits from 2018

It has been a big year for Skimlinks. And as 2018 draws to a close, we want to reflect on our greatest hits from this year. So curl up somewhere warm and scroll through our list of the best things we’ve done in 2018:

Product, product, product!

There’s been so much output from Skimlinks’ Product Team, we actually started a Slack channel to help people keep up with updates: There have been over 300 this year!

But three releases were bigger than the other 300 put together and they were all designed around pain points we wanted to solve for publishers.

First we wanted to help publishers increase conversions and the earnings-per-click (EPC) on their articles. Shoppers are savvier, want the best price for what they’re buying, and we know that if readers are given a choice of prices within an article they are more likely to buy a product, increasing conversions and EPC. Our partnership with Monetizer101 now offers this functionality and give publishers’ readers the widest possible choice of items.

Editors also want to know all the latest information about commission rates. So we overhauled our Google Chrome Editor Toolbar extension. It now shows exclusive rates a merchant offers publishers, gives the ability to create links without going via the Publisher Hub, and lets teams see the different rates offered to their different domains.

And lastly, we wanted to conquer the last great frontier: mobile. Mobile traffic has surged in recent years, and overtook desktop this year as the browsing channel of choice on Black Friday for the first time. But there’s been a consistent conversion gap. Courtesy of our first-to-market Google AMP solution, publishers can now monetize their AMP articles and open the gateway to earning significant revenues from mobile content.

The inaugural Commerce Awards for Publishers (also known as The CAPS)!

Commerce content can be responsible for up to 25% of a publishers’ revenue. But it lacks the same recognition as wider spread revenue streams like subscriptions and display advertising. So we wanted to find a vehicle to showcase commerce content excellence from Skimlinks publishers and share best practices with the wider industry.

90 attendees, 50 submissions, 12 awards and 4 judges later the Commerce Awards for Publishers were born.

We were thrilled to entertain clients of all shapes and sizes at the event in New York in September and can’t wait to celebrate again soon in 2019!

Commerce content works to increase engagement on editorial sites

We believe commerce content is the only revenue stream that actually improves the experience publishers offer to readers.

And this year we published the research that proves it: Working with GQ, we showed that people that interact with commerce content spend twice as much time on content overall and are nearly 10% more likely to return than people who don’t interact with commerce articles.

To have our findings published in AdExchanger and Digiday is both a testament to the great work GQ is doing, and the advantages to publishers of creating commerce content.

New faces, new places

On a personnel front it has been a huge year for Skimlinks. Our new CEO Sebastien Blanc has fast made his mark since his appointment in April and we’ve picked up a VP of Marketing and Chief Data Architect to head up vital teams in the business. We’ve also hired a massive 29 people since January which is helping power our momentum as an organization as we enter 2019.

On top of that we have been all over the world this year, raising the profile of commerce content to publishers. The team has made stops in Chicago, Las Vegas, Singapore, Sydney, Paris, Cologne and more.

In total over 4000 publishers have joined our network this year and we can’t wait to help them grow their commerce revenue in 2019. It has been a fantastic year and we are even more ambitious as we approach 2019. Our focus is now on the horizon, furthering our work to help publishers earn as much commerce revenue as possible, and continue to provide market leading solutions to support that goal. Onwards and upwards!