Content monetisation platform Skimlinks has launched innovative new tools to help fashioned-focused publishers.
The technology company, which provides affiliate marketing tools for publishers and converts normal merchant links into affiliate links, has unveiled ‘Fashion Engine’ and ‘Showcases’.
Fashion Engine accurately interprets vague, but fashion-specific attributes such as brand names, colours and clothing or accessory types; which are analysed in real-time to provide relevant product matches from Skimlinks’ database of more than 11 million fashion products.
“Fashion publishers have been using Skimlinks to monetise for years, but a key challenge has been for technology to understand often vague wording like ‘little black dress’ and match it with a relevant product, said chief executive officer and co-founder of Skimlinks, Alicia Navarro.
“In a first for fashion publishers, the Skimlinks Fashion Engine can accurately identify fashion products mentioned in content and match them with the most relevant and yield-optimised retailer link, all at scale in real-time. Fashion publishers can choose to leverage this new engine with SkimWords or with Showcases, an evolution which takes fashion monetisation to the next level.”
Fashion Focus
Showcases is a near-text unit that populates automatically with the products mentioned in the content. Leveraging Skimlink’s SkimWords technology to accurately identify product references in content, Showcases provides a visual way to complement publishers’ content with additional revenue-generating potential.
“With Showcases, we aimed to create natural extensions to content that didn’t appear ad-like, Navarro said.
“We believe that near-text monetisation offers huge potential for publishers, as it can add richness to the user experience without sacrificing display ad real estate. Showcases are available now to all Skimlinks publishers via their newly launched Publisher Hub, with the Fashion Engine automatically boosting results across all Skimlinks semantic technologies.”
Skimlinks which has offices in London, San Francisco and New York, is not the first performance marketing-related company to up its focus on the fashion market. In March global digital media agency 7thingsmedia, announced its ‘strategic investment’ in popular fashion platform; Fashion Traffic.
Fashion also proved to be quite the growth market for Raktuten LinkShare, as revealed in a PerformanceIN.com story last week.