History of Affiliate Marketing

CDNOW realised websites that had a bias towards music could list albums on their pages that their visitors would be able to purchase. Such websites could also offer the visitor a portal that would direct them to CDNOW in order to make their purchases.

This idea of remote purchasing was first muted by music label Geffen Records in 1994 who wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to get directly involved itself. They asked CDNOW to implement a system in which CDNOW would handle the order processing. In this way, CDNOW could connect directly the artist on its website to Geffen's website. Such a system would avoid the CDNOW home page and go directly to the artist's music page.

Amazon launched its own system in 1996. This enabled an individual who subscribed to the programme to either place a banner or text link on their website, or link directly to the Amazon home page. With this system, whenever a visitor clicked on the associate's website, they were redirected through to Amazon. Should they make a purchase, the associate would receive payment in the form of a commission.

The first merchant to make an affiliate program available to those who signed-up was, in fact, not Amazon. However, their programme was the first to become widely accepted. Furthermore, it went on to act as a yardstick for other programmes.

Its pre-eminence was further established in February 2000 when Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent relating to all the essential components of an affiliate programme. The patent application
was presented in June 1997, at a time when affiliate programmes had only just established a presence on the internet.

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