LONDON & NEW YORK – Skimlinks, the leading content-to-commerce monetisation platform, today announced the appointment of Sebastien Blanc to Chief Executive Officer. Alicia Navarro, Skimlinks’ co-founder and current CEO, was the driving force behind this role transition, and as President she will continue to contribute to the company as a founding visionary, client and partner advocate, and board member.
Today @Skimlinks announced the appointment of CRO Sebastien Blanc to CEO and Co-founder Alicia Navarro to President.
“Seb taking the reins as CEO is incredibly exciting,” said Navarro. “He has a drive for excellence and a disciplined growth mindset that will take Skimlinks to the next level. As our Chief Revenue Officer for the past two years, Seb was instrumental in driving an acceleration in growth and efficiency that helped Skimlinks reach profitability. Skimlinks’ culture is one of our most important assets. Seb’s deep appreciation for our team, our customers, and our mission make him my natural choice to take over responsibility of the company I started and led for ten years.”
Blanc has over 15 years experience in the media and advertising industry as an investor, advisor, and senior executive. Prior to joining Skimlinks, Blanc was a Director at Quantcast, where he built and led the global media buying operations across five countries and signed the first 3,000 private deals with premium publishers. Blanc joined Quantcast through their acquisition of Struq, a programmatic advertising and retargeting specialist, where he launched the US operation and took revenues from $0 to $10 million in 18 months. Originally from France, Blanc has lived and worked in Paris, New York, San Francisco, and London.
“Over the last two years, as CRO of Skimlinks, I have enjoyed working with Alicia and seeing her lead with a level of passion and dedication that only a founder can truly bring,” said Blanc. “She built a great business and a great team. I am looking forward to building upon what already makes us special, and finding new ways to deliver value for our customers and opportunities for growth to our people.”
John Brimacombe, Partner at Sussex Place Ventures and lead investor in Skimlinks’ Series A, will assume the role of Interim Executive Chairman while the company conducts a search for a permanent Chairman. Brimacombe commented, “Alicia is a model founder. Along with her co-founder Joe Stepniewski, Alicia took Skimlinks from an idea to more than $50 million in annual revenues. As the company now enters a new chapter of growth, Alicia made the bold decision to find a successor and guide the board through a thoughtful process to select a new CEO. I deeply respect and appreciate all that Alicia and Joe have done, and I’m delighted to work with Seb in his role as CEO.”
As President, Navarro will remain involved with Skimlinks and continue to evangelise the company’s mission to help publishers diversify their revenues by monetising content through commerce. Under Navarro’s leadership, Skimlinks raised $25 million in venture funding and built a monetisation platform that today includes over 57,000 publisher clients running Skimlinks technology on 4.5 million websites around the world, driving billions in e-commerce sales. In addition to supporting Skimlinks, Navarro will channel her enthusiasm and passion for entrepreneurship to help start and build other early-stage companies.
“Since we led their Series C, Skimlinks has solidified its position as a lucrative partner to many of the world’s best-known digital publishers, becoming the undisputed leader in the category they created for commerce-related content monetisation,” commented Joe Krancki, Partner at Frog Capital. “We’re thrilled to have Seb carry Alicia’s vision forward as the new CEO of Skimlinks and continue transforming the way publishers earn revenue from their content.”
About Skimlinks
Skimlinks is the leading content-to-commerce platform globally, helping publishers monetize their editorial content, and marketers find people who want to buy their products.
Skimlinks’ platform creates new revenue for publishers by: automating the affiliation of commerce-related content, and syndicating the resulting shopping-intent data to marketers and merchants to help them reach consumers interested in their products or brands. This data-as-a-service – Audiences by Skimlinks – is now the largest source of shopping-intent data available to marketers for use in the platform of their choice.
Skimlinks’ mission is to help publishers be rewarded for the role content plays in driving sales, and to help merchants understand what is driving those sales.
Skimlinks is used on 4.5 million websites globally by companies such as BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Condé Nast, The Wirecutter, and HuffPost. With this network, and its connection to more than 24,000 merchants, Skimlinks sees the content-to-commerce journeys of about 1.6 billion people monthly.
Learn more at www.skimlinks.com.
