Affiliate
Marketing - It's Origins
The idea of
revenue sharing, in which a commission is paid for all referred
business, is an
idea that was conceived before the advent of affiliate marketing, and
the
Internet itself.
The World Wide Web
was launched in November 1994. The adoption of this revenue sharing
concept by
e-commerce, which consists of the buying and selling of products and
services
over the Internet, occurred almost four years later.
It is a widely
accepted fact that Cybererotica was among the early instigators of
affiliate
marketing with the introduction of a cost per click program, which
relates to
the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other
Internet
publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one
visitor to
its website.
In 1994, CDNOW
launched its BuyWeb program in which it represented the first non-adult
website
to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its
idea of
click-through purchasing, where Click-through
rate or CTR is a
way of
measuring the success of an online advertising campaign.
In this way, the
CTR is derived from the number of users who clicked on a web page ad
divided by
the number of times the ad was presented, called impressions. For
example, if
an ad was presented 100 times and one person clicked on it, then the
CTR would
be 1 percent.
CDNOW realised
websites that had a bias towards music could list albums on their pages
that
their visitors would be able to purchase. Such websites could also
offer the
visitor a portal that would direct them to CDNOW in order to make their
purchases.
This idea of
remote purchasing was first muted by music label Geffen Records in 1994
who
wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not
want to
get directly involved itself. They asked CDNOW to implement a system in
which
CDNOW would handle the order processing. In this way, CDNOW could
connect
directly the artist on its website to Geffen's website. Such a system
would
avoid the CDNOW home page and go directly to the artist's music page.
Amazon launched
its own system in 1996. This enabled an individual who subscribed to
the
programme to either place a banner or text link on their website, or
link
directly to the Amazon home page. With this system, whenever a visitor
clicked
on the associate's website, they were redirected through to Amazon.
Should they
make a purchase, the associate would receive payment in the form of a
commission.
The first
merchant to make an affiliate program available to those who signed-up
was, in
fact, not Amazon. However, their programme was the first to become
widely
accepted. Furthermore, it went on to act as a yardstick for other
programmes.
Its pre-eminence
was further established in February 2000 when Amazon announced that it
had been
granted a patent relating to all the essential components of an
affiliate
programme. The patent application was presented in June 1997, at a time
when
affiliate programmes had only just established a presence on the
internet.
Affiliate
– How To Succeed
Peter Radford writes
Articles
with Websites on a wide range of subjects. Affiliate
Articles cover Background, History, Methods of Compensation, Websites,
Various
Issues.
His Websitecontains over 140 Affiliate
Articles.
View hisWebsite
at: affiliate-how-to-succeed.com
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