Mumbai based publishing website launches CueLinks — a content monetization tool

Two years ago, Mehul and Jimish Jobanputra launched a publishing website, DesiDime, an online shopping community. The website today generates 1.6 million visitors every month but like everyone they also had their run-ins with the well known beast of monetization. “CueLinks was born because we are ourselves a publisher and we realized the need to have a better link management and reporting solution,” informs Mehul.

CueLinks is a content monetization solution for bloggers, deal site owners, coupon sites, basically any website which sends outbound traffic. Affiliate or performance marketing is believed to be on the rise and Mehul claims that the increased momentum that online shopping has gained in India, will lead to a growth of four to five times over in the next couple of years in this sector. CueLinks will help publishers monetize their content in an effective manner with minimal efforts from their end.

Since their launch in September 2012, over 100 publishers have joined CueLinks. “The initial response has been quite encouraging to us. We can very confidently say that we currently work with the largest number of merchants in India as we have the advantage of working with all the networks and other direct merchants as well,” says Jimish. In terms of revenue, some big publishers like Sulekha have joined CueLinks. They now send 50% more traffic to their merchant and affiliate network partners compared to what they did two months back.Talking to Satya Prabhakar, founder of Sulekha, he mentions, "“Cuelinks is a great monetization product built ground-up by Mehul and Jimish – Sulekha.com has been testing Cuelinks in some parts of the website over the last 3 months and it is proving to be adept in generating good eCPC / eCPM values for our clicks. The product has several features that are world-class – and combined with some of the industry’s best affiliate commissions as of the end of 2012.”

The biggest challenge for Cuelinks remains in educating Indian bloggers and publishers about affiliate marketing and the role that marketing channel can play in monetization of their website. Cuelinks has a transparent revenue sharing model — 65% of the revenue which they get from merchants or affiliate networks is passed to the publishers. For top performing publishers, the revenue sharing can go as high as 75%. However, use of technology is free for content owners.

Besides the Jobanputras, Mark Friedgan is the advisor at CueLinks. Providing more technology solutions to publishers, like keywords insertion and inline price comparison are some future plans that CueLinks has. With plans to enter international markets this year, CueLinks is also on an aggressive hiring spree, says Mehul.