Connexity Expands Retail Network Reach and Improves Commerce Opportunities with Skimlinks Acquisition
SANTA MONICA and LONDON — May 28, 2020 — Connexity, the leading independent source of new customers and sales for online retailers, announces today that it has acquired Skimlinks, the leading monetization solution for commerce-oriented publishers.
Online retailers are taking advantage of increased demand in commerce oriented channels to diversify outside of traditional walled gardens like paid search. Connexity’s acquisition of Skimlinks creates the largest independent customer acquisition channel for ecommerce adding thousands of new retail-oriented publishers, including many desirable and respected consumer-facing media brands. The companies’ combined reach will drive nearly $2.5 Billion in commerce annually.
Online publishers are increasingly turning to lead generation commerce revenue as a way to increase monetization of their loyal shopping audiences. Publishers are looking to expand and diversify those monetization sources to include cost-per-click budgets in addition to traditional CPA budgets. Bringing Connexity’s longstanding direct retailer advertising relationships to Skimlinks’ impressive network of publishers will be a big step forward in providing easy access to those cost-per-click budgets and enabling both improved monetization yield and diversification.
“Connexity and Skimlinks share a similar mission as architects of online shopping markets” said Bill Glass, CEO of Connexity. “Our solutions help retailers acquire new customers and sales while enabling ecommerce-oriented publishers to monetize engaged shopping audiences. Combining the companies creates more scale on both sides of the marketplace.”
Merchants advertising on Connexity will benefit from easy access to new, high-quality traffic sources on Skimlinks like marquee publishers such as Condé Nast, DotDash, Hearst, Vox Media and over half of the top100 publishers globally. Connexity’s enterprise publishers and ShopYourLikes social influencer partners will also benefit from access to CPA affiliate advertising budgets from over 48,500 retail advertisers live on the Skimlinks platform.
Skimlinks publishers will benefit from access to incremental cost-per-click monetization in budgets of premium Connexity merchants including brands like Dell, Wayfair, Chewy, Kohl’s, Skechers and more. Skimlinks advertising partners will also obtain easy access to Connexity’s premium publisher and social influence marketing network without any incremental work.
“Our combined scale will fortify Connexity as a critical customer acquisition channel for retailers and will strengthen publisher monetization solutions”, said Sebastien Blanc, CEO of Skimlinks. “By marrying Connexity’s CPC search budgets with the broad CPA affiliate monetization coverage of Skimlinks, we provide best-in-class monetization for publishers.”
Connexity was advised on the transaction by the JEGI. Skimlinks was advised by Stifel.
About Skimlinks
Skimlinks powers commerce content strategies for publishers. As the world’s largest commerce content monetisation platform, Skimlinks helps grow a revenue stream that can contribute as much as a quarter of a publisher’s overall revenue, which enables publishers to be less dependent on advertising.
Skimlinks technology automatically earns publishers a share of sales they drive through product links in commerce-related content created by editors. The platform is a one stop solution providing the technology and the data to start, grow and successfully scale a content commerce strategy across desktop, tablet and mobile.
Skimlinks connects 60,000 publishers to 48,500 merchants around the world, generating $2.5m of sales every day. With over ten years in the industry, Skimlinks is ideally placed to become the publishers trusted long-term partner. Clients include half of the top content publishers in the world such as Conde Nast, Hearst, Yahoo!, Huffington Post, Trinity Mirror, MailOnline, Pedestrian Group, and South China Morning Post.
Skimlinks operates globally, with a significant footprint in the US and UK, as well as fast growing operations in Europe and APAC. Skimlinks was founded by Alicia Navarro and Joe Stepniewski in 2007.
