LinkShare, pay-per-action marketing network, has released Flex Links, an embedded link technology that tracks the use of online advertising content such as widgets, videos, music or Flash animation. The announcement was made on December 20.
Flex Links allows publishers to use and monetize advertisers’ content on their sites, said Steve Denton, president of LinkShare.
“It really opens up a great opportunity for advertisers to provide outstanding content to publishers that will make a better a shopping experience for consumers,” he said.
LinkShare, New York, is owned by Rakuten Inc., an Internet service company headquartered in Tokyo.
Flex Links enables pay-per-action tracking to be embedded in advertisers’ content. The link is then automatically converted when a publisher picks up that content.
“It’s a unique offering that is exclusive to LinkShare,” Denton said.
For example, a music download site could put a playlist on a publisher’s site, Denton said. Users would then be able to listen to music on the publisher’s site without leaving that site until they were ready to make a purchase.
“This really allows the publishers not just to pick up an ad unit, but pick up really great content for their site,” Denton said.
ShopNBC, a television, Internet and direct mail retailer, was the first of LinkShare’s customers to test out the new technology.
“Flex Links will enable us to syndicate our breadth of live and archived video sales presentations in a simple and easy to implement means, providing our affiliates with an outstanding new sales tool,” said Geoff Smith, VP of ShopNBC.com, in a statement.
