It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are trying to find new ways to support their dwindling ad revenue by further monetizing site traffic by ways such as affiliate marketing. But what does this focused entry into the space mean for traditional affiliate companies?
Some of the additional revenue streams for publications are the long-running white-label dating sites and job boards (which are basically modern versions of the classified’s section) and co-branded travel bookings, to more daring ideas such as shopping sites, contextual affiliate links in articles and even full-blown comparison sites such as Guardian Digital Comparison and Independent Compare.
Is this the future of Affiliate marketing? To some extent I think it is; these sites have very strong propositions by virtue of their trusted brands, armies of editors and massive visitor numbers. Without further insight under the bonnet I can’t comment on how well they manage to convert their traffic, but according to Skimlinks (who provide automated contextual affiliate links to Mail Online and others) there are larger sites that manage to add an extra £6000 per month by doing nothing more than switching on their affiliate link technology. Although this figure might not impress anyone paying the bills of a major publication (or even a small one) it indicates that there is volume potential to be tapped into.
So back to my original question – how does this development impact traditional affiliate companies? On the far right end of the continuum of editorial and commercial sites we have the traditional affiliate companies (see below). Considering that the golden days of Paid Search arbitrage and simple bridge pages are long gone, one thought is that traditional publication sites would be excellent candidates to fill the search space with their rich, value adding content that, if well implemented, could satisfy Googles Quality Score requirements as well as efficiently funnel users to desired action. By having a quick look at the search space it does however seem like most newspapers doesn’t do any Paid Search activity for anything but jobs and dating and only organically ranks on quite long-tail keywords for their affiliate services which suggests their broader affiliate offering haven’t been considered in the SEM strategy (yet). The publications move towards a more commercial intent is however not without its own internal struggle as they need to be wary of their journalistic independence.
Whatever plans the big publications may have I’m confident that their greatest contribution to the affiliate marketing industry will be to help create greater awareness of the channel leading to affiliate marketing getting a larger share of budgets.
Clever traditional affiliate companies have already started the process of creating their own branded site properties to meet the big publications somewhere towards the middle of the editorial and commercial continuum in order to have long-lasting thriving businesses. Watch this space!
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