Companies Using Skimlinks

I pulled Skimlinks out of our October 2026 crawl to see which publishers let a script turn their product mentions into affiliate links. A domain counts when its pages load a script from skimresources.com or expose one of Skimlinks' JavaScript objects. That's the publisher side of the deal. The merchants who pay the commissions are mostly invisible here, because they don't run the script. The total is 5,786 live domains, 1,943 of them matched to a company, 13th of 96 in Affiliate & Referral. Skimlinks' company page calls it a Taboola company, acquired in 2021. Joining is free for publishers, and Skimlinks keeps 25% of each commission, per its support article on charges.

One account is a fifth of the count

The script's file name carries the publisher's ID, so I counted accounts as well as domains. On the 4,667 clean domains where an ID was visible, there are 2,580 different publisher IDs. One of them covers 1,185 domains: enthusiast forums such as gsxr.com, rs25.com and 3si.org, whose pages name VerticalScope Inc. of Toronto. That's 20.5% of the 5,790 domains we kept after removing for-sale and gambling pages, and a quarter of the domains with a visible ID. They are VerticalScope's own forums, so this is one customer with a lot of sites, not a platform putting its key on strangers' pages. The next account down has 92 domains, also forums.

The big media groups organise it differently. Penske Media runs Variety, Rolling Stone, Billboard, WWD, Robb Report and Vibe under one ID. Hearst puts Elle, Esquire and Car and Driver under another. Condé Nast splits its titles, and Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair each have their own.

Sales signal: collapse a Skimlinks list by owner before you size it. The 4,667 domains with a visible ID belong to 2,580 accounts, and one account holds a quarter of them.

103 domains in three months

The chart reads 4,529 in June, 5,683 in July, 5,687 in August, 5,735 in September and 5,786 in October. The June to July jump is mostly our side: the domains we crawl turn over every month, with dead sites leaving and new ones arriving, and our detection signals widen. After July, Skimlinks added 103 domains in three months. Since March 2026, 902 domains have dropped it, and about 160 of those still run it on another hostname, so some drops are a publisher retiring a subdomain rather than leaving.

"Skimlinks' footprint is a few thousand publishers plus one forum company. Before you treat the count as a market, work out how much of it is VerticalScope." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: treat this as a steady pool of about 5,800 publisher domains. Nothing in our data supports pitching it as a growing segment.

Who the publishers are

Among matched companies with a known size, 71.12% have 1 to 10 employees and 19.38% have 11 to 50. That's how blogs, niche review sites and forums look on LinkedIn. Only 11 companies list more than 1,000 staff. The recognisable titles sit in the middle bands instead: Variety, Billboard, Car and Driver and Rolling Stone are each listed at 51 to 200, which is the size of a magazine's own team inside a bigger group. Age splits the same way. 50.89% were founded in the 2010s and 20.9% in the 2020s, while Vogue (1892), Billboard (1894) and Variety (1905) are among the 30 matched companies founded before 1960.

A few rows are merchants, not publishers. On's design site, Johnston & Murphy and LELO load a different Skimlinks file, a merchant tag named after their own domain and served from assistjs.skimresources.com. We logged it on 12 domains, against about 4,800 loading the publisher script, so the merchant side barely registers in this count.

Sales signal: for most of this list, the person who added Skimlinks also writes the content and sells the ads. Pitch revenue per page and time saved. At the magazine groups, look for a commerce or affiliate editor, and expect one buyer to cover several titles.

English-language media, mostly American

We matched 1,023 Skimlinks companies to the United States, 305 to the United Kingdom, 116 to Australia and 107 to Canada. Those four are 91.1% of the companies in the top 15 countries. Continental Europe barely registers: France 18, the Netherlands 16, Germany 15. Book and Periodical Publishing leads the industries at 7.94%, and with Online Audio and Video Media (6.03%), Media Production (5.04%) and Internet Publishing (2.43%) the media group reaches 21.44%. Retail Apparel and Fashion (5.45%) is higher than you'd expect for a publisher tool. Brands such as Rose Inc and Abbott run the publisher script on their own sites, which puts them in this count.

Sales signal: a Skimlinks list is an English-language publisher list. For UK and Australian commerce-content teams it's ready to use; for continental Europe it has too few rows to be worth a campaign.

Publishers that run two link networks

We don't publish switching rows for Skimlinks, because none pass our tests. The overlaps are real, though. 171 domains run Skimlinks and Sovrn//Commerce today, out of 194 ever seen with both, so 88% kept both. 231 Skimlinks domains also carry AWIN's advertiser tag, 112 ShareASale's and 63 impact.com's. Those sites advertise on one network and publish on Skimlinks at the same time.

"Publishers don't swap Skimlinks for Sovrn. Of the domains we've seen with both, nearly nine in ten still run both." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a publisher running both link networks is shopping for yield. Pitch comparison, link routing and reporting to them.

An ad stack with a link script on top

Across the 5,791 live Skimlinks domains we kept, DoubleClick Floodlight runs on 46.37%, AdSense on 43.19%, Google Publisher Tag on 39.84% and Prebid on 37.02%. Taboola, Skimlinks' owner, is on 37.45%, and 1,153 of those Taboola domains are VerticalScope forums, 97% of the forum group. comScore's audience tag is on 31.22% and Blockthrough, an ad-recovery tool, on 24.0%. WordPress is the main builder at only 38.27%; 1,087 of the forum domains run on XenForo instead.

Sales signal: these publishers already earn from display ads and Taboola. Skimlinks is a second or third revenue line, so commerce-content tools, review templates and link management fit. A pitch for yet another ad network will land on a full stack.

Key takeaways

1. 5,786 live domains, 13th of 96 in Affiliate & Referral with 1.83%, nearly three times Sovrn//Commerce's 2,074.
2. The rule sees the publisher side; about a dozen merchants carry Skimlinks' merchant tag.
3. VerticalScope's own forums are 1,185 domains under one publisher ID, 20.5% of the clean count.
4. 71.12% of matched companies have 10 or fewer staff, but the named customers are Condé Nast, Hearst and Penske titles.
5. Flat since July 2026; 902 domains dropped it since March, about 160 of them still running it on another hostname.

Sales applications

Outreach template: "Your site turns its product links into affiliate links with Skimlinks. More than a third of the publishers we see doing that also run Taboola and Prebid, so links are one revenue line among several. We help commerce editors earn more per article without adding another ad unit."

Targeting: filter Skimlinks domains on TechnologyChecker.io to the United Kingdom and Australia, set the VerticalScope forums aside, and sort by company size. What's left is the independent and mid-size publishers.

Competitive angle: the 171 domains that run Skimlinks and Sovrn//Commerce together are already comparing networks. They're the natural audience for link routing or yield reporting.

Explore all 5,786 Skimlinks domains and 1,943 matched companies on TechnologyChecker.io.