The Hitflip UK Blog

These days I am reading a lot of affiliate and online marketing blogs (here’s a good selection of links by Fraser) and one of the articles I found very informative is the dissection of affiliate marketing by Lee. Because I find it interesiting to figure out how affiliate marketing works in the UK I thought it might be interesting for people from the UK to know how things work in Germany. Of course I do not now everything but I have some insights and experience so I allow myself to assume my estimations are close to the truth. (You know we Germans are overmodest, right? ;-)) Not only does the affiliate network market differ but also the way affiliates generally work. I’ll try to stick to Lees nomenclature to avoid misunderstandings. Three of seven ways of affiliate marketing mentioned are not an issue in Germany (Web Spam / Made for AdSense / Blog spam / Email Spam Spyware / adware / malware) as most merchants and networks do not allow you to do it and you will get kicked out of the affiliate programm or affiliate network if they catch you doing it. Affiliate referral does exist but of course it is naturally a niche market. That leaves three areas uncovered: PPC, (respectable) SEO and Community Sites. PPC seams to be the biggist thing in english affiliate marketing in all it’s different variations. In Germany it is a niche! When German companies want to appear in paid search results they either do it themselves or hire an online marketing agency specialized in keyword buying. This marketing via paid seach / keyword buying is seen as something independent of affiliate marketing. Of course when you have an affiliate programm some affiliates might also do some AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Miva or whatever but that is a very, very small fraction. If I’d had to guess a number I’d be 10% or less. Most of affiliate marketing in Germany happens in a mixture of community sites and SEO if I stick to Lees terms. Affiliates have their “projects” and they optimize it so it appears as far up as possible in the natural (non paid) search results. Then the webmaster/affiliates and the users of their websites add content to make the site more unique, bigger and important for more topics. So this kind of websites / projects are 90% of German affiliate marketing! Quite different, don’t you think?

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There has been a survey initiated at the UK-Affiliate4U-Forum regarding the usage of different affiliate networks. That survey inspierd a german forum regarding affiliate marketing programms (called 100partnerprogramme.de meaning 100 affiliate programs) to initiate a similar survey. The A4U-Forum claimes to have more than 12.000 users and still the poll had only 17 participants. The german forum has only a little more than 1000 users but so far 95 people participated in the poll. The german issue of the poll has also been mentioned in a few affiliate marketing related blogs. Here’s what both polls look like at the moment.

Even though the rate of participants in both forums is really low and especially poor at A4U the results still support the impressions that I gathered during AdTech and Affiliate4U-Get2Gether. In Germany there are only two class A players: Affili.net and Zanox. All the rest ist far, far behind no matter what they state. The UK affiliate network market is far more fragmented. There are more strong players and the others are not very far behind.

As a merchant / publisher we tend to stick with the market leaders as they will have the biggest number of affiliates. In Germany we have our affiliate programm at Affilinet and Zanox and in Austria we only have it at Affilinet. In UK we’ll probably go for Tradedoubler and CJ but we are not certain yet.