Affiliate Marketing - a7ay/ajay GitHub Wiki

This year is the 20th anniversary of affiliate marketing, the industry is growing at a rapid pace and is concourse to hit 4.5 Billion by 2016. It all started after a conversation between a person with a blog and the CEO of Amazon. After the conversation, Jeff Bezos thought of an idea where Amazon would share revenue with publishers driving legitimate traffic toward Amazon and receive a part of the revenue in return. Some credit William Tobin, for the PC Flower Inc business he launched on Prodigy net, his company supported the tenant of affiliate marketing.

Google indexes 50 billion pages and an average adult in the united states spends 5 hours online daily. Consumers are scattered all over the web in small communities, and as time spent online has surpassed TV watching. e-commerce merchants need a meaningful way to have conversations with consumers wherever they choose to spend their time. It is prohibitively expensive to reach each publisher and ask them to add a link back to your site. It is equally inefficient for publishers to spend time finding the best ads for their consumers amongst the various commerce sites. Affiliate marketing networks fill this void, they bring the content publishers & merchants together. The publisher can register their sites and receive a small piece of HTML that forms the portal for receiving relevant ads. Merchants can register the products they want to promote and the revenue they are willing to share. The top 3 marketplaces are Commission Junction, Linkshare, and Google affiliate network. Google is in the process of shutting down this business in favor of its search-based advertising. All the tracking & accounting is done by the affiliate network for smooth flow of commerce

Some e-commerce sites go at it alone and manage an affiliate network themselves and take on the responsibility themselves Probably resulting in cost savings and higher revenue for the publishers. Ebay, Amazon are a few merchants that manage affiliates directly.

There are downsides to using an affiliate network many small advertisers have found the hard way that traffic coming from many of these affiliate sites is theirs to being with, the most common case is where the user search for a coupon just before completing a purchase, fraudulent publishing sites advertise coupons for advertisers even though none exists, and in the search for coupons users end up on these sides which drop a cookie in consumers browser. Now if the consumer completes the transaction the referral credit will go to the affiliate publisher. Advertisers need to be careful and pay attention to where the traffic is coming from.

In 2013 eBay sent FBI agents to 2 of its biggest affiliates claiming 20 million of revenue generated by these affiliates was fraudulent. These affiliates used a technique called 'cookie stuffing' These fraudsters gave away a browser widget that helped bloggers understand incoming traffic to their site. Every time the widget was invoked it clandestinely add an eBay cookie to the user's browser, and if the use made any purchase on eBay the credit would go to the publisher of the widgets. By the widget was removed it had spread to more than 650,000 computers.