Hello AMP Community,

I'm Tamas, Staff Engineer of Publisher Content team at Skimlinks.

Skimlinks is the leading commerce content monetization platform, supporting publishers’ creation of a new revenue stream that allows them to be less dependent on advertising.

We work with over half of the top 100 US and UK publishers and our technology is deployed on 7.2% of the top 10k websites (source: https://trends.builtwith.com/ads/SkimLinks).

We monetize 1.3 million clicks on a daily basis and this increases to 4.4 million clicks on key shopping days such as Black Friday.

Motivation

We are continually working with publishers on ways to increase their revenue streams, without damaging user experience.

The consistent ask we receive from some of the world's leading publishers, including Vox Media, HuffPost and Hearst, is to provide them with a Skimlinks AMP extension.

This would enable them to accelerate the monetization of their content through AMP.

Requirements

Our proposed AMP implementation is the same as our standard javascript implementation that is outlined below.

We are huge believers of the core AMP principle, performance over everything else (no one likes bloated pages). Our typical desktop javascript bundle is currently just below 10kb, for AMP we are aiming for a fraction of this.

Core functionality to be built as an AMP component initially:

• The core functionality is monetizing retailer links on the publisher website by converting them to the equivalent affiliate link. In order to do this the Javascript collects the unique domains from the page and consults with our API, that responds with a subset that can be monetized
• The javascript does page impression and link impression tracking
• We track both monetized and non monetized clicks
• We have a bunch of inclusion / exclusion rules to enable our publishers to exclude / include certain sections / domains from monetization

Potential functionality for future AMP development:

• Our "Skimwords" product is identifying product references in articles and converts them to links to the relevant product page on the retailer's side
• Our "Skimlinks Unlinked" product is identifying written, but not linked urls to retailers and converting them to links

Besides the above functionality requirements, based on the discussions with our Publishers, ease of implementation is critical, so we propose a single tag with optional attributes.

amp-skimlinks

<amp-skimlinks
    data-publisher-id="1X2"  // skimlinks publisher id
    data-skimlinks="true"    // turn link monetization on / off
    data-tracking="true"     // turn tracking on / off
    data-skimwords="true"     // turn skimwords on / off
    ...
    />