GEKKOLinks First to Create Automatic Affiliate Links from Hotel References
Posted: Wednesday 11 August, 2010
Bloggers to Large Media Sites will see Significant Increased Revenue from their Travel Content
A new service launches in beta today that will remove the technical and practical complexities associated with creating revenue-generating affiliate links for publishers of travel content. Gekko (www.gekko.com), the personal shopping assistant for hotels, is launching GEKKOLinks, which will help thousands of travel publishers to create affiliate links automatically for hotel mentions on their pages. Gekko has already signed up one well known travel publisher to the GEKKOLinks beta programme and is in discussions with many more.
Gekko's patent-pending technology, which is to be first applied to the hotel industry, is capable of recognising exact or non-exact (fuzzy) references to products in text. The technology automatically creates an affiliate link that is matched with Gekko's extensive database of hotels so publishers are given access to relevant content that will help their readers to decide and purchase.
The technology will help consumers get more relevant, contextual and transactional information from the sites they visit. When they hover over the link or associated icon in an article, GEKKOLinks creates a pop up box, allowing them to find out more information on a hotel, check availability, compare prices, as well as letting them book directly, without ever having to leave the site.
GEKKOLinks will help travel publishers, from bloggers to large media sites, to significantly increase revenue from existing and future travel content. Publishers can easily sign up to the beta programme through Gekko's partner pages (http://www.gekko.com/gekkolinks/signup) and include a javascript code on their site. The rest is done automatically. The technology recognises exact or non exact (fuzzy) references of hotels in the site's pages and automatically creates relevant affiliate links.
Michel Cassius, CEO of Gekko, commented: "GEKKOLinks provides publishers with a quick and easy way to achieve additional revenues from existing content without disrupting the customer experience. The affiliate links created are: contextual in that our technology understands the context of the articles, relevant as we are giving publishers access to our extensive database of hotels, and transactional as we are making available the booking and price comparison engines from our consumer site, www.gekko.com. We are very excited about the potential for the technology behind GEKKOLinks, not only for the hotel industry but also for other sectors and applications."
