Nov
27
History of affiliate marketing
November 27, 2008 |
Most of people had the impression that the affiliate marketing emerged with the development of the internet marketing in the 1990s. But this is not true because the history of affiliate marketing goes back before this date. The affiliate marketing was present between related jobs like, the reference and recommendation between a real estate broker and a mortgage lender. With the development of the internet and the online marketing, the affiliate marketing took a new curve to become the leading marketing method.
The most known success story of online affiliate marketing was that of Amazon website in 1996 when they declared that they need to affiliate with other websites to promote for their books. They gathered 30 000 websites at that time and that number increased into 600 000 websites now. The Amazon were not the first to do the affiliate marketing, they were preceded by other trials but on a lower scale, like CDNOW. They affiliated with the Geffen records to sell their albums. CDNOW was first responsible to make the purchases of the Geffen records’ albums through its website. Afterwards CDNOW developed a program where the customer could click the link to go through to the main album page at the Geffen records’ website and buy from there. By bypassing CDNOW from the process of selling their role was only limited to directing the traffic to the Geffen records hope page. but the Amazon were the first to document their trial and set the rules for this kind of marketing, they had been granted the patent in 2000 on the essential tools of affiliate marketing.
In the same period, other websites affiliated with each other to promote their products. The first websites to realize the potential of this type of marketing were the adult websites and they used it to direct huge traffic into their websites. After they realized that most of the traffic is just derived by the curiosity of visitors to check the content of their websites, the webmasters of this industry changed from the simple pay per click method into the pay per sale method in order to make sure that their campaign will return the intended results.
Most of the affiliate programs now do not use the pay per click method due to the fraud clicking issues. They switched now for the pay per sale or pay per lead methods which are more effective and reliable.
Nowadays, the affiliate marketing grew into the most popular way of marketing impacting the amount of e-commerce done through the World Wide Web. In 2006 the reports estimated that the websites paid more than 6.5 billion dollars as commissions for affiliates with expectations for this figure to increase in the following years. That means, as a rough figure, the sales were over 20 billion US dollars on 2006. The affiliate marketing now is for people who know the rules of the game and you possess a high quality website to enter this field and take part in the process.
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