Earlier this morning I have been listening to Shawn Collins’ and Missy Ward’s InBound Marketing Summit presentation entitled “Five Successful Strategies for Monetizing Blogs”, and Shawn has mentioned some interesting statistics. Apparently, out of the 100 online retailers ranked by Internet Retailer as the “Hot 100 Retail Web Sites”, 75 have affiliate programs.
Shawn also included a pie chart which he posted in December 2008 in his blog, which shows the affiliate platforms that these 75 web retailers utilize. Since the DoubleClick Performics affiliate network is now a part of the Google Affiliate Network, the pie chart currently looks this way:
38% of the 75 top Internet retailers chose Commission Junction, 23% went with Google Affilite Network, 18% with LinkShare, 13% run their affiliate programs on in-house-based platforms, 3% market through ShareASale, 3% through AvantLink, and 2% through Pepperjam.
That’s probably valid for really *huge* retailers.
Smaller ones (i.e. <$50k/mo) seems to be flocking to SAS and then to smaller networks…
Gleb
You’re right, Gleb, this is based on the data from larger retailers (top 100 retail websites); but while it would certainly be of extreme interest to chart out a pie based on, say, the top 1,000 e-tailers, I would suspect that the overall distribution of affiliate marketing cash flow would follow a pattern similar to the one represented in the above distribution.