Affiliate marketing is an agreement between an e-commerce website (merchant) and a content publisher (affiliate). The content publisher integrates affiliate links on its platforms that lead users to the sites of affiliated merchants. Each affiliate link includes a script that tracks a user's actions.
In the United States and Europe, several major media outlets have been using affiliate marketing to monetize their assets in recent years. In 2015, Rakuten, the world's largest affiliate network, commissioned Forrester, an expert firm, to evaluate the future of affiliate marketing. Forrester surveyed more than 150 advertising decision-makers from U.S. companies with revenues of $200 million or more, as well as more than 150 decision-makers from U.S. publishers that rank among the top 5,000 sites in terms of U.S. traffic volume. The majority of the publishers surveyed mentioned that affiliate marketing generated nearly 20% of their annual revenues.
The most popular and lucrative media (Better Home & Gardens, Shape, Cosmopolitan) use affiliation and are at an advanced stage of adopting this method of monetization.
The techniques to active affiliate marketing partnerships include e-commerce sites, content marketing, email marketing, coupon sites.