As a career journalist, I have to admit that I was a bit squeamish when I first heard about Skimlinks, a service that turns an ordinary link to a product I might be writing about into an “affiliate marketing link” that generates revenue for my site.
After all, I’m sort of old school when it comes to those sort of things. I came from the side of the business that wouldn’t be compromised by worrying about bringing money into the site. To insert a link for the sake of bringing in a few coins just makes me feel like I’ve compromised myself and my readers.
Recognizing that, Skimlinks has come up with a system that brings dozens of affiliate marketing programs, including Google’s AdSense, into a site by automating the links to a product that a publisher might place in the content anyway. With the process running in the background, the publisher of the content can write freely, without worrying that he has somehow compromised his credibility for a percentage of a sale of a digital camera. The company explains how it works nicely in a video on its site.
Before I can get all holier-than-thou about my journalistic ethics, I need to remind myself that the industry that trained me to waive these sort of red flags - the newspaper industry - is the same one that has been pretty much beaten to a pulp by the shift of ad dollars from print to online. And even though newspapers have migrated to the Web - albeit, grudgingly - they have not recovered those lost ad dollars to the extent that they could avoid massive cuts to newsrooms.
Times have changed and areas of the print edition that were once sacred and considered to be no-ad zones, such as the front page of the paper, now carry them. In that sense, some might argue that newspapers compromised news coverage for ad dollars. In a twisted kind of way, programs like Skimlinks actually bring back some credibility because the link doesn’t look any different than any other link. And because they’re relevant to the topic, they’re more user-friendly and definitely less intrusive that a banner ad, for example.
To enhance the Skimlinks service, the company today is introducing Skimkit, a toolkit that allows users to search for images and links to products in the Skimlinks databases for promotion on their sites.
The thing I had to remind myself here is that not all blogs and online content is traditional journalism news. Some are review sites, focused on particular products, fashion trends, shopping services and more. In those cases, publishers are looking for specific products to link to.
And if there’s some money to be made in publishing, why not embed a few links to earn a few bucks. After all, there are plenty of legitimate online news sources using Google’s AdSense program - and I can’t say that a few ads like that are going to make me think any less of the content itself.
If I’m going to judge a blog’s content, I usually get a better sense of the credibility by reading the blog posts and picking up on the blogger’s writing style. A few links on a site isn’t enough of a red flag for anyone to judge the quality of the blog’s content.
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