Everyone associated with the affiliate marketing market knows how fast the market is gaining momentum. But not everyone knows how it started off.
Today we would like share with you some interesting facts from the history of affiliate marketing.
The Budding of the Flowers of Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing in the form we know it now was thought up by William J. Tobin, founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. PC Flowers & Gifts — an online flower sales business, was the seventh of ten startups he created and the first project in the world with an affiliate program.
The idea of promoting products on the internet with the assistance of affiliates dawned on his enterprising mind in 1989. He launched an affiliate program on the Prodigy network, with which he shared a commission on each sale.
By 1993, this brought Prodigy more than $6 million a year. After gaining such success, in 1996, Tobin was offered to patent his idea, but he managed to get a patent only in 2000.
The years when music was sold on CDs
In 1994, the idea was picked up by the gentlemen from CDNow (CDNOW.com) — music sellers and pioneers of online retailing.
They launched the BuyWeb program, which made it possible for websites to earn extra money by posting reviews or information about music albums. The reviews were supplemented by links to CDNOW.com, where users could get a CD with the album. If an album was bought, the site that posted the link received a commission by check or in the form of discounts on CDs.
Global affiliate program
In 1996, Amazon invaded the world of affiliate marketing and they were the first to launch a global affiliate program. The Associates Program allowed people to sign up to post links on their website. For posting links on their own resources, users received a reward in the form of a small amount of money. Subsequently, many affiliate networks took up this model as a basis.
The formal birth of affiliate solution providers came to be in 1996 with the launch of LinkShare and Be Free.
The First Affiliate Networks
In 1998, five students from the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the Commission Junction network. In the same year, the Clickbank network was founded by Tim and Eileen Barber. These two networks were the first in cooperating with other businesses, and not only in promoting their product, and they are still one of the most popular networks in the history of the market to this day.
Cookies and other boons of the internet era
A small lyrical introduction, since this is very interesting: the person who created the cookies and gave them that name — Lou Montulli — developed one of the earliest web browsers, Lynx, in 1991. According to the programmer, the name Cookies comes from the term “Magic Cookies”, which appeared earlier. Magic Cookies are a small set of data transferred from one program to another program.
The creation of cookies enabled tracking of the impact of affiliate marketing, the arrival of ecommerce in the late 90s, proliferation of online publishing in the 2000s and rise of influencers in 2010 — all this has contributed to the transformation of the affiliate marketing industry into the multi-million dollar industry that we know today.
Which facts from this article were you already familiar with?
Share with us your opinions and some facts that were not included in the article!
Thank you and see you soon!
Respectfully,
The HOQU Team
