Everything You Have To Know About Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network is essentially an intermediate between publishers and merchant affiliate programs. Affiliate networks assist publishers or affiliates as they are commonly recognized, to easily know the affiliate programs that will get more traffic and hence more income for their web sites. It also allows the online merchants to market their affiliate programs to all publishers who are taking part in the affiliate networks. It is a mutually beneficial scheme for publishers and online merchants to get together at one place and earn the benefits.
Affiliate networks are based on the concept of revenue sharing that is, they let merchants give a part of revenue produced to him from visitors to the publisher's web site. There may also be a fee for each visitor on the site that undertakes and completes a certain action such as making a purchase, or for registering and subscribing for a newsletter or a magazine. But usually revenue sharing is the standard method as compared to or contrary to a fee-per-action model. Affiliate networks with many advertisers also attract a large pool of the publishers. Big affiliate networks generally do not need to recruit publishers as the publishers usually head to them on their own. Typically websites that draw in the same kind of target audience as the advertisers but without any competition in them are typical affiliate network associates.
Affiliate networks have grown very quickly since their inception. Viewed as marketing toys in early days of world wide web, they have become an essential part of business plans of many companies around the world. In fact they have been so profitable that they have grown into larger businesses than the existing offline business. The total revenue amount produced according to one source by affiliate networks is £2.16 billion in UK by itself for the year 2006. And In the same year for the USA the total bounty amounted close to US $ 6.5 billion.
Affiliate networks are mostly used in variety of sources like retail, gaming and gambling, personal finance, travel, education, telecom and also publishing. Typically the affiliates are welcome to join the network free of charge while there is generally a minimal fee for the merchants to participate. The network also charges an initial setup or a membership fee which are recurring. Although affiliates join free of charge, but they pay a certain percentage of their income as compensation to affiliate network.
Affiliate networks are a large conglomeration of publishers and suppliers working towards a common goal; profit realization. Merchants derive benefits like tracking technology, payment processing, reporting tools as well as a large group of publishers out of the affiliate network. On the other hand, affiliates derive services and benefits like affiliate programs, reporting tools and also payment aggregation by using the network.