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!