Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

A 12 year journey ends as Skimlinks is acquired by retail marketing platform Connexity

Connexity, a lead-gen platform for online retailers, has acquired Skimlinks, a UK platform for publishers to make money through affiliate links. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Skimlinks had raised a total of $25.5M and reached a late a Series C stage of funding, the final round coming from Frog Capital which invested $16M.

An early Seed investor was Sussex Place Ventures way back in 2009. For context, San Francisco-based competitor VigLink, which has raised a total of $27.3 million, remains an independent company.

Sources in the VC industry indicate that the acquisition was a “decent one” that may even have hit three figures, with a possible a large-ish earnout and equity component. Certainly, this was not a ‘firesale,’ by any means.

Although coy on the price of the acquisition, co-founder and President Alicia Navarro said: “Every party, including many staff, has made money out of this deal and is very happy.”

Cofounded in 2007 by Navarro and Joe Stepniewski, Skimlinks rode the wave of online activity as publishers struggled to monetize their ballooning online operations in the mid-teens of the last decade. Affiliate programs allow publishers to get a cut of the revenue when their link drives a purchase on an e-commerce site. Skimlinks makes the process easier through automation.

Originally spinning out of an idea Navarro had about consumer online commerce habits — a startup called Skimbit which resembled Pinterest in some respects — it had scaled to the US by the time I interviewed Navarro in 2012.

In 2013 it took on a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners.

A couple of years later the platform was driving more than $500 million in e-commerce sales for publishers.

By 2016 editorial content from its publisher network of 1.5M domains had driven nearly $1 billion of ecommerce transactions and the company said it was on a path to profitability.

In 2018 Navarro stepped away from the CEO position, taking on the role of President, and handed the reigns to Sebastien Blanc, previously Chief Revenue Officer.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Navarro said the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated the growth of the business as more publishers in its network monetized the massively increased online traffic, brought about by global lockdown policies.

Bill Glass, CEO of Connexity said in a statement: “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.”

Sebastien Blanc, CEO of Skimlinks said: “By marrying Connexity’s CPC search budgets with the broad CPA affiliate monetization coverage of Skimlinks, we provide best-in-class monetization for publishers. Our combined scale will fortify Connexity as a critically important customer acquisition channel for retailers and will strengthen publisher monetization solutions.”

And what of the founders? Stepniewski has taken on a senior role with Facebook UK. Navarro is now working on a fresh startup she bills as “AirBnB-meets-Calm as a service” allowing founders or executives to unplug and get into what is known as ‘Deep Work’.

She is now in the process of early-stage fundraising, so her entrepreneurial journey is clearly going to continue.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the world’s largest cannabis dispensary avoids social media restrictions

Planet 13 is the world’s largest cannabis dispensary. Located in Las Vegas, blocks off the Strip, the facility is the size of a small Walmart. By design, it’s hard to miss. Planet 13 is upending the dispensary model. It’s big, loud and visitors are encouraged to photograph everything. As part of the cannabis industry, Planet 13 is heavily restricted on the type of content it can publish on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms. It’s not allowed to post pictures of buds or vapes on some sites. It can’t talk about pricing or product selection on others.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Morgan Celeste SF Blogger (@bayareabeautyblogger) on Jan 25, 2020 at 7:54pm PST Instead, Planet 13 encourages its thousands of visitors to take photos and videos. Starting with the entrance, the facility is full of surprises tailored for the ‘gram. As a business, Planet 13’s social media content is heavily restricted a...
3 comments
Read more

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Billionaire clothing dynasty heiress launches Everybody & Everyone to make fashion sustainable

Veronica Chou’s family has made its fortune at the forefront of the fast fashion business through investments in companies like Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger . But now, the heiress to an estimated $2.1 billion fortune is launching her own company, Everybody & Everyone , to prove that the fashion industry can be both environmentally sustainable and profitable. There’s no argument about the negative impacts of the fashion industry on the environment. The textiles industry primarily uses non-renewable resources — on the order of 98 million tons per year. That includes the oil to make synthetic fibers, fertilizers to grow cotton, and toxic chemicals to dye, treat, and produce the textiles used to make clothes. The greenhouse gas footprint from textiles production was roughly 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2015 — more than all international flights and maritime shipments combined (and a lot of those maritime shipments and international flights were hauling clothes). The lit...
Post a Comment
Read more