Affiliate Marketing – Its Past And The Present

Affiliate marketing is a practice where revenue is shared between online advertisers and online publishers, based on performance parameters like sales, clicks and registrations. It is a practice followed on the internet where a website rewards one or more of its affiliates for every visitor or customer brought by that particular affiliate’s marketing effort.Affiliate marketing has grown rapidly since its inception.  In the earlier days, e-commerce website was viewed as a marketing toy on the internet.  However, this has become an integral part every company’s overall business plan.  In some cases, this has grown exponentially into a much larger business than the offline regular business.  According to one source, the overall business estimated to have been done by the affiliate networks till now this year is approximately close to $12 billion worldwide.

In affiliate marketing, affiliates earn commissions through  a variety of sources in retail, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, personal finance and from lead generation activities on the internet. The most active sectors for affiliate marketing currently are adult, retail and the gambling industry. The sectors that are expected to see exponential growth are telecom, finance and travel sectors.  These are followed by the entertainment and the internet related services sectors.

Affiliate marketing is poised for the kind of growth never witnessed before. Affiliates are expect to see an increased interest from the business to business marketers and advertisers in having affiliate marketing as a part of their business mix