Affiliate Network:

A web service which acts as an intermediary between product merchants and affiliates .

• Merchants looking for affiliates to promote their product run into the problem of where to find and recruit them.

• Affiliates looking through the web for promising products to promote need to invest a lot of time and effort in this search.

Affiliate Networks can solve these problems for both parties.

Merchants can register and for a fee place their product amongst others on a high traffic site with a very targeted public, i.e. affiliates looking for products.

Affiliates can browse through the listings, have all potential merchants and products in one place and don’t need to perform a websearch for each single product.

Big and well known Affiliate Networks are Clickbank, Commission Junction or Linkshare .

Example for the merchant product listings on www.clickbank.com in the category Sports & Recreation. It gives affiliates all the information they need to decide which offer to select for promotion. On the left are the most popular and successful products. On the right under "Sponsored Links" are products for which the merchant paid Clickbank to have its listing appear on this page.

Affiliates have access to their unique affiliate links and to promotional material on the Network site. Also the earned commissions are paid out via the Network.

The Affiliate Network earns by charging the merchants a set-up fee for each campaign and a fee for every successful sale through it’s Network.

[Affiliate comes from Latin affiliare = to be connected;

Net goes back through a couple of similar terms to Old Norse net;

Work goes back to Old English wyrcean]

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