Let’s say I have a website and
want to run a third-party offer on it. I join one of the
companies that have established relationships with the
actual advertiser so that I can chose different ads, have
online stats, and ultimately get paid. What does that make
me to the company that has aggregated these third-party
offers – am I a publisher, or perhaps am I their affiliate?
https://www.lynxtrack.com/signup.php
In
the webmaster community, those who run offers, from either
third-party aggregators or from a particular company, call
themselves affiliates. What the company calls them doesn’t
matter. Having personally always used “publisher” rather
than “affiliate” to describe the nature of the relationship
between advertiser and the traffic owner running the offer,
I found being around self-titled affiliates fascinating. For
me, the difference rested in both personal preference and
size – large traffic sources were publishers; smaller ones
were affiliates. I think many in our space, especially
readers of the Confidential, use the terms affiliate
and publisher interchangeably.
Having just spent the past few
days at a webmaster conference though, I’ve come to find
that two names – publisher versus affiliate – have very
different meanings. Walking around the show, sitting in on
the sessions, and listening to people that called themselves
affiliates added clarity and meaning to the distinction
between the affiliate and publisher. By looking at traffic
sources that call themselves affiliates as opposed to
publishers, four main differences come to light. They are in
the areas of targeting, traffic, general concerns, and
culture.
Among the most glaring
difference between an affiliate and a publisher is
targeting. Affiliates care about targeted traffic. Like real
estate agents, the mantra for affiliates isn’t “Location.
Location. Location.” It’s, “Targeting. Targeting.
Targeting.” They do not do run of network. They focus only
on targeted traffic and matching it up with like
advertisers. Whether the content dictates the ad or the ad
the content, the two must relate.
How affiliates get their
traffic also differs compared to a typical publisher. A
publisher might have a high trafficked website, and they
might even call themselves an affiliate, but if building a
community site is what they do or if they run a site about Britney
Spears, that alone wouldn’t make them an affiliate in the
eyes of the webmaster community. Affiliates in the webmaster
community focus on not just targeted traffic but actively
generating traffic for a specific target, For them traffic
does not arrive, they generate it. True affiliates eat and
sleep search engine optimization. They don’t just buy
keywords, they study the algorithms, develop sites with tens
of thousands of pages, and as mentioned in the section on
targeting, they’ll even build sites based on the advertiser.
Content is certainly king because content gets them ranked
and has them receiving traffic. When it comes to traffic,
affiliates don’t buy pops and banners or care as much about
linking. They care about topical relevance and getting
ranked for that topic. They aren’t about buying traffic but
having it find them.
Besides targeting and traffic,
part of what makes an affiliate an affiliate is their pains.
Affiliates are more sensitive about ad ware than most
publishers. They tend to be more active on discussion
boards. They read and try to predict what the search engines
will do. They don’t care as much about the origin of their
traffic and generally have much less interest in showing
pops and banners. They are less likely to have email lists
or be in tune with the direct marketing efforts of the major
ad networks. They don’t care about gift cards or
registration paths.
The final major distinction
between affiliates and publishers is their culture. Despite
the fact that they also get paid on a per action basis, be
it lead or sale and care just about conversion rates not
just click through rates, the people and companies
sponsoring the webmaster conventions differ greatly. There
are no organized parties, no excess. They are purpose
driven. Affiliates are more likely to work from home – their
goal to not be at a large company. There isn’t venture
funding for affiliates. A movie that describes them is more
likely to be Revenge of the Nerds not Startup.com.
While they help each other out, they are just as likely to
be extremely secretive, guarding information about what
programs work and how they got their pages ranked.
In the end, whether one thinks
of their traffic sources or themselves as an affiliate or
publisher will most likely remain a matter of personal
preference. What we see though is that in exploring the
difference between affiliate and publisher, we’re able to
better tease out meaningful distinctions between types of
traffic and the people behind them. Having had the
opportunity to go to two conferences both attended by
thousands of people in the online advertising space, among
the easiest ways to see if one is a true affiliate is to see
not necessarily whose offers they promote but the following:
affiliates don’t go to Ad:Tech; publishers do. When it
comes to being an affiliate, it’s not the size of the booth
or the premium, it’s what the booth has to say that matters
to them. With whom these affiliates work is also very
interesting and a topic for a future “Thought.”
