Interesting Information from the 2009 AffStat Report

Recently while compiling materials for internal consumption about the affiliate marketing industry as a whole, I came across the AffStat report from 2009. This report is essentially the compilation of results from a survey filled out by around 450 publishers. I have been reading this report for the past couple years, and I think it's a great way for advertisers to understand the space and what they should be doing with their programs to help them grow. I'd highly suggest checking it out. You can find a copy here.

There were a few particular areas that i found interesting, and as a company we have taken steps to allow our advertisers to leverage our Inuvo Platform to take advantage...

One question asked if publishers owned domains dedicated to specific programs they are in. 55% of respondents said they did. That's roughly 248 affiliates surveyed.

To me, this means to me that there is a large number of publishers building their own landing pages to drive traffic to, or have entire sites of content that they use to drove traffic to specific niche offers. One feature we are currently working on is a Host and Post feature which will allow these types of pubs to capture lead data at their own sites through forms they HOST, then POST that info to the advertiser through our platform. We think this will be a great tool for our publishers, and it's being built in such a way to be very user friendly for advertisers to create the forms to provide to the publishers.

Another questions asked how publishers find most of the offers that they join. The largest number was 18% ( around 81 respondents) use affiliate directories which was not terribly surprising, but 17% (around 77 respondents) use Google searches!

I was a bit surprised by how high this number was as I figured most people would be logging into network or directories to search for new offers to join, or simply hearing from affiliate managers. In order to help our advertisers to take advantage of this fact, we have created static offer pages for every offer in our Platform, so we can help our advertisers' offers be found by searches like this. This is something we will be tweaking and refining over the weeks/months ahead to make sure we are getting our clients the most exposure that we can.

Reading this report again got me thinking about the other side of the coin though, what if there was a report like this with data from the advertiser side? The AffStat report validates what we are striving to do on the publisher side, and we'd like to do the same on the advertiser side. We've created a similar survey for advertisers, and we will begin circulating it in the next week or two. We'll be using the data to publish a report on the state of the advertiser side of the industry, which not only can help us to build the tools advertisers need, but also give them something to benchmark their programs to.

I'll update this post with a link to the survey when it has gone live, and I look forward to sharing the results!

The Affiliate Marketing Industry is Broken

We receive many questions about why we have created the Inuvo Platform, and how it's any different than the other tracking solutions available to advertisers and publishers out there. The "why" is easy, the Affiliate Marketing Industry is broken! The "how", on the other hand, is a bit more complex!

So, why have we created the Inuvo Platform? I understand that "The Industry is Broken" might be a bit vague, so let me explain. Particularly on the cost-per-action (CPA) side of the industry, "business as usual" has been advertisers putting offers in multiple networks, setting an amount per lead, and waiting for transactions. They have very little insight into who is driving the traffic, who is re-branding that offer and placing it in another network as an "exclusive offer", or how the amount they are paying for a lead is getting distributed. In many cases you may have five or more people getting a cut of that original amount! This is a result of the advertiser not being able to connect with a publisher directly. Take the example below...

An insurance company wants to pay $50 for a lead....

Insurance Company pays Network A $50

Network A farms the offer out to eight other networks, re-branding it as an "exclusive offer" for each.

Network A gives these eight other networks $45 per lead and keeps $5

Four of those networks promote this offer to their publishers

Those four networks keep $5, and give $40 to their publishers

The other four networks farm this offer out again re-branded as something new to five additional networks each

The other four networks keep $5, those twenty other networks each get $40


Those 20 additional networks keep $5 and give their publishers $35

This doesn't even take into account that the actual publisher might then be bidding on keywords in a search engine to drive traffic, so there is another player that gets a cut. As you can see, this can get very complicated very quickly! When it's all said and done, just to connect an advertiser (the insurance company in this example), to the end customer, four to five different people take a cut. This is the problem we are looking to solve with the Inuvo Platform!

That brings us to the "how". As a company that has been in the space as a technology solution provider for a while now, we have taken that stance again here. Our goal is to provide a marketplace that will allow advertisers to connect directly to the publishers that can get them their desired action - a lead, a sale, a click, or anything else they might be looking for. To do this, we needed to create a new kind of advertising platform. This platform is the Inuvo Platform.

In the past Inuvo offered a technology solution called My Affiliate Program (MyAP® for short), that was a software solution allowing an advertiser to manage their own private affiliate program. This idea was the basis for the Inuvo Platform, but we took it further. The Platform not only provides this sort of technical tracking solution, but we also offer a marketplace where publishers can join and promote these advertiser programs.

Our Platform allows for transparent communication, publisher and advertiser ratings, fraud detection, check processing, etc. We want to create a marketplace where advertisers and publishers can interact directly, removing the need for the large number of "middlemen" involved in the traditional process.

This benefits both the advertiser—understanding who they are working with, and where their money is going, and the publisher—having the insight who they are working for as well, and the ability to earn more when there aren't three or more layers between them and the advertiser taking a cut.


I'd be interested to hear what you think of all of this, as we welcome all feedback! This Platform is growing and we are adding features regularly to accommodate the needs of our clients, and in general to help remove some of the noise from an otherwise very noisy industry!

A bit about me and the site

So I figured I'd start things off by telling any readers that stumble across this site a bit about myself, and the intent of this site. I am currently the VP of Affiliate Products for Inuvo, and Internet marketing company based in Clearwater, Florida. I am a bit of a jack of all trades, with my duties ranging from the tech side of guiding feature additions to our marketing platform, to the other side of the spectrum working with our sales team to actually sell the product we develop. I've found that this wide range of duties has given me unique insight into may different aspects of Internet marketing, and my goal with this site is to share as much of that as possible. I was also forced, er... asked nicely, by our marketing department at Inuvo to do this blog, so I can't take all the credit for what I will be sharing here.

I've been working in the Affiliate Marketing space for a little over five years now, and have had the opportunity to meet some great people along the way! I hope to be able to feature some of them from time to time with this site, and talk about what they are up to and how they are helping to change the space as a whole.

Stay tuned! I look forward to sharing some of the things I have learned over the years, and I hope to hear from readers as well and get some conversations going about the industry and how it can be improved for everyone involved!