According to the article, this month marks 15 years of affiliate marketing with the first program launched by CyberErotica in 1994.
Micro-blogging has combined the global reach of websites and blogs with the real-time nature of instant messaging. Online retailer Amazon.com is cashing in on this by extending its Associates program to pay referral fees for links in Twitter messages and in Facebook status updates and comments.
While the article predicts many other companies will follow, it details the method’s downfalls including the increase of spam; the large amount of untrackable links currently online and the difficulty level of maintaining working and trackable links.
“People are lazy. More than half of Twitter users are using a Twitter application to do their tweeting. Until the affiliate programs are integrated into the social networking platforms or the applications used on these platforms this affiliate marketing by individuals won’t take off,” the blog’s author Steve Poland said.
The article describes how integration would benefit all parties involved: Twitter would grow in users; Twitter users would earn money and affiliate programs would grow.
Nevertheless, integrating affiliate programs into micro-blogging platforms would drive referral fees down, according to the article.
“If sales remained flat and 5 percent of all purchases were referrals previously and now that number becomes 25 percent, then Amazon.com can’t be paying out 8 percent referral commissions (unless sales went up five times too), so Amazon.com would reduce that to 1.6 percent referral commissions,” Poland said.