Affiliate Marketing is Booming – 52 Merchants Join Linkshare
The soft retail climate doesn’t appear to be affecting e-commerce in the U.S., as one company is finding out. LinkShare recruited 52 new advertisers in the first-quarter, up significantly from 30 in 4Q 2007. The company’s lead generation service was a key driver, as LinkShare explains in a news release out today.
Analysts estimate U.S. online advertising revenues will rise between 15% and 19% in 2008. In a recent survey by Jupiter Research and LinkShare, that growth will be fueled by improving multichannel initiatives, better merchandising, more customized offerings, and increasingly sophisticated marketing, such as pay-per-action marketing.
Here are portions of the LinkShare Press Release Olena just sent me.
NEW YORK – April 16, 2008 – LinkShare, a leading pay-per-action marketing network, announced the addition of 52 new advertisers to its network for the first-quarter of 2008.
The new customers outpace LinkShare’s fourth-quarter number of 30 new customers and represent some of the fastest-growing markets in e-commerce, including financial services, real estate, dating, home services, business services, education and insurance.
“Our new customers join a global network of advertisers and publishers that rely on LinkShare to simplify online marketing to reach millions of consumers every day,” said Arun Bordoloi, Senior Vice President, LinkShare Corporation. “We are becoming the network of choice for search, lead generation and affiliate marketing among both the Internet Retailer 500 and small to mid-sized businesses, demonstrating that our pay per action model is a key differentiator at every level.”
“One of our fastest growing programs, LinkShare Lead Advantage, is growing quickly because it delivers high quality, targeted leads to advertisers on a cost per action basis. That’s particularly powerful in a soft retail climate.”
Joining the LinkShare Lead Advantage network are several companies that include notable advertisers such as infoUSA, NetQuote, Apartments.com, Relocation.com, and Insurance.com.
The Press Release also features some Linkshare customer insights including: what’s working for such price-sensitive goods as computers (from CompUSA.com) and insurance (from Insurance.com) as well as Handango’s views about the mobile market.
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#1 Ruck wrote on Thursday, April 17th, 2008:
52? Wow. I haven’t used Linkshare in ages but that definitely warrants checking them out again. Probably should incorporate a lot more retail affiliate marketing with my lead generation efforts.
#2 Linda Buquet wrote on Thursday, April 17th, 2008:
Hey Ruck!
Even if you don’t do retail, lots of those new merchants they added were lead-based programs, due to their new lead gen service. The big 3 networks all have some good pay per lead offers.
DoubleClick Performics also added 52 new programs in Q3 07. Based on the influx of new merchants I seeing joining that network, I would guess their numbers for Q1 08 may be higher than that.
My blog about that:
52 Affiliate Programs Join DoubleClick Performics in Q3
Good to see business is growing for the networks – upward trends are always good to see!
#3 Chelsey Langan wrote on Thursday, April 17th, 2008:
I think that this is an area for Linkshare that we will see grow. Both Apartments.com and NetQuote have CJ programs, but they must feel like they aren’t reaching all the potential traffic they can get with CJ. Plus, it is a much more controlled enviornment so the expected ROI has to be a good selling feature!