The idea of an affiliate network and how it perverted
The idea of the affiliate program made a lot of websites big and famous. I actually think that all major e-commerce websites have one. An affiliate program works like that:
A webmaster links to your pages with a certain code, which triggers a cookie to be set on the surfers computer (pay per sale/pay per lead) OR links via a hit counter script (pay per click). Based on success you (= merchant) pay the webmaster for clicks or sales.
So far so good and a fair deal. Googles AdSense is based on that and Overture does the same - these are basically anonymous pay-per-click affiliate networks. Other companies like shareasale offer a pay per sale technology, but they are all based on the same idea: you send me customers, i pay you commission.
But there is a shady taste beyond that kewl idea: if you can send over a lot of potential customers, you will get paid a lot, which is still a good thing. But now the downside: some people do nearly everything to gather the traffic to send to you. They flood the search engines with senseless pages just to artificially rank high, they spam and they popup on your nerves.
A responsible attitude towards the internet is needed but nowhere to see. The search engines fight a hard and bloody war against these spammers/spamdexers, but still: they are there and we are on the way to run a web of 50% total useless advertisment driven sites, which delute the information density. Bad stuff going on - keep that in mind, when you surf!
Nevertheless are affiliate networks providing the possibility for small websites and bloggers to create a little money stream to finance the server space and a beer once in a while. The IDEA of affiliate networks is very good, just the evil human nature perverted it.
November 21st, 2005 at 11:15 am
[...] More than 2 month ago I wrote my little rant about affiliate networks and how they could lead to bloated search engines and shady technologies. [...]