Companies like Facebook and Google have an immense advantage over independent publishers thanks to their impressive scale and massive data stores.
It is nearly impossible for small and mid-size publishers, however, to create their own predictive models of shopping intent and that ultimately limits their ability to command advertising dollars. Fortunately, there are solutions emerging which hope to create a least a little more balance in the digital landscape.
Audiences by Skimlinks, for example, is a new audience targeting service that advertisers can access via programmatic buying platforms to improve their campaigns. Digital advertisers are charged to target "segments" of users highly likely to buy their products. What this means is that in addition to the affiliate revenue publishers earn with Skimlinks currently, they now have the opportunity to earn additional incremental revenue for the intent signals their publisher sites collect and share with the Skimlinks data cooperative.
Skimlinks currently captures and analyzes more than 15 billion "intent" signals across its network every day, including what products and brands people are reading about, clicking on, and buying. The data from all of these content-to-commerce experiences - coupled with its existing product intelligence layer - enables Skimlinks to create a taxonomy of audience segments that are highly predictive of purchase behaviors. Audiene segments that can be monetized more effectively for publishers.
"What excites me the most and the thing I'm incredibly proud of is that Skimlinks can act as the platform through which publishers, large and small, can gain enough scale as a data cooperative to benefit from audience revenues and insights," said Skimlinks CEO & Co-founder Alicia Navarro. "We're thrilled to be launching a product that will help publishers be properly rewarded for the role they play in creating shopping intent."
As a digital publisher, would you be willing to share data on your user's online behavior in exchange for additional revenue?
More on Skimlinks from Website Magazine:
+ Skimlink Rethinks the Hyperlink
+ Top50 Performance Marketing Platforms
+ Performance Data From the Browser