Rigorous yet speedy: Inside The Skimlinks Approvals Process

Our approvals process is how we determine whether or not a publisher will be a good fit for our service.

You can sign up for Skimlinks here

We are deliberately selective: Over the years we have cultivated a high quality network of editorial partners and we plan to keep it that way.

The approvals process helps us figure out if we’ll be a good fit for each other or not.

How does the approval process work?

We review all publisher applications that come in and ask for further details when necessary.

There is a high volume of applications each day but the team usually gets back to publishers within two working days.

If you’re a merchant you will hear from the team, but they will redirect you to signup for an affiliate network, as we don’t directly work with merchants.

What are our criteria?

• Approved publishers must not promote any sort of sensitive or illegal content
  • E.g. A site promoting counterfeit accessories
• Sites must have content suitable for commerce content monetization
  • Sites focused on political or religious content can be too contentious to monetise, while current affairs focused sites don’t lend themselves to content monetization through affiliate marketing
  • If a site isn’t focused around products and services available online, then there isn’t much we’ll be able to monetize.
• Publisher domain names cannot include brand or product names
  • If a reader is looking for a brand’s website they don’t want to arrive on a publisher’s website by mistake
  • Likewise Merchants don’t want readers to mistake a publisher’s website for their own, so will not work with publishers that use their brand name
• Adult content
  • Currently we don’t work with adult-themed publishers, as brands are sensitive about where their products appear
• Audience in markets we operate in
  • Skimlinks has a global footprint with publishers around the world, but our footprint is more limited in some areas than others, so we do also assess whether we have sufficient merchants in a region to help monetise an audience located there

In short we’re looking for publishers with original content that mention products and merchants in a way that adds value to readers. If that basic element is there it is highly likely publishers’ content can be useful to merchants and monetized using Skimlinks’ platform.

So hopefully with the information above you are better informed about our approvals process and are now free to apply to Skimlinks. Sign up here.