The Affiliate Marketing market, as well as the sphere of affiliate interaction in general, has experienced many transformations, new innovative directions and automation over the past few decades. A lot of services and tools have appeared that greatly simplify the life of a modern webmaster in working with traffic. But where does this direction come from and who was the first to come up with such a sales model?
Today we decided to take you back to history and talked about the most important facts from the biography of Affiliate Marketing.
The beginning literally sprouted from the seed at PC Flowers & Gifts, founded by William J. Tobin. He came up with a promotion scheme and decided to promote his products on the Internet with the help of intermediaries in 1989 and launched the first Prodigy Affiliate Program, with which he shared a commission. A few years later, by 1995, the network already had 2600 partners on the WWW, and this model began to bring Tobin millions of dollars.
Public recognition of this beneficial partnership occurred in 1994, just 4 years after the advent of the WWW.
In the same year, the guys from CDNow picked up the idea and decided to implement it with an advantage for their users. They developed the BuyWeb program.
The model was simple: sites hosted reviews or information about music albums, bands, and music genres and supplemented them with links to buy. When selling, the site received a commission or discount on the purchase of the album.
However, the first global Affiliate Program as we know it was invented by Amazon. It was they who launched the Associates Program in 1996, in which people could register to place a banner or text links to individual books on their websites, or a link to Amazon itself. For selling a book or posting a link, they could get a certain amount of money. More and more companies began to follow the example of Amazon and use this business model.
In the same year, the famous LinkShare and Be Free appeared.
Some of the currently popular networks are Commission Junction and Clickbank. In 1998, they not only promoted their product, but also began to cooperate with other businesses and companies, giving rise to a whole era and a new concept of doing business, which is gaining momentum and improving before our eyes, and we all take part in it, form it here and now.