How Do Affiliate Marketers Assess Themselves? (Seeing like an Affiliate Marketer Part 7)
All other works in this series have been my interpretation of the affiliate marketer as a cultural phenomenon. Yet, as initiatives of large corporations, affiliate marketers interpret and assess themselves. Corporate life is rife with interpretation: from letters to shareholders to key performance indicators, corporations account intimately their profits, and therefore must interpret all of their own actions in terms of potential payoff.
Skimlinks, a company that provides research and analytics to affiliate marketers, provides a case study for The Strategist, Vox Media’s (and, before the former’s acquisition of the latter, New York Media’s) affiliate marketing arm. Skimlinks provides a newsletter with relevant industry information that The Strategist uses to make editorial decisions. To promote this newsletter, Skimlinks interviewed Camilla Cho, Executive Director of Business Development & Strategy at now defunct New York Media.
The Strategist has provided an important primary source for my discussion of affiliate marketing, but in the field of anthropology we distinguish the ethnography, an interpretation by an outsider, from the autoethnography, an interpretation of a cultural phenomenon by a member of that culture. Cho provides both an interesting autoethnography of affiliate marketing, and an important historical account of The Strategist’s rise.
The Origin of The Strategist
One of our writers found a pair of nail clippers in an airport in Japan, saw them on Amazon, and we sold a ton of nail clippers. That kind of success led us to decide that a standalone commerce brand could be a success.
Camilla Cho
I do like how kismet launched what is now an institution in the world of affiliate marketing. I am sure that the writer who discovered these clippers, like all those who find a truly wonderful product, was genuine. They wanted to share their crucial find with the world, and being a writer at a major publication, they could do so easily. Yet, Amazon’s affiliate marketing service, which I addressed in my history of the affiliate marketer, created a novel vector for New York Media to not just better the world through product-recommendation, but to make a profit.
No doubt there are products advertised in The Strategist with similar backstories: a writer found a product that solved a legitimate need, and then shared it with the world. Yet, none of them will have the innocence of this pair of nail clippers, since The Strategist, through Skimlinks’ newsletter, now has a more mercenary and less candid means of identifying products to feature.
The Strategist’s Key Achievements
183% higher earnings-per-click than our network average
5 media brands with expansive commerce strategies
121% affiliate revenue growth rate year-on-year, 2015-2016
The Strategist’s earnings-per-click interest me the most. For traditional journalism, earnings-per-click denotes the amount of money that their advertisers provide the publication when a reader clicks on an article. The above statistic is worrisome. If affiliate tracking links are twice as effective at generating revenue as traditional journalism, one must wonder why Vox Media keeps a traditional journalism branch at all. Yes, other factors exist: if traditional journalism produces more bountiful clicks, then the total revenue from traditional journalism may outweigh the total revenue accrued through affiliate marketing. The real metric of interest is the earnings-per-labor-hours, that is, how much revenue an article makes divided by the time that its writer spent writing it. Still, the lucrative nature of affiliate marketing presents a good investment for traditional media, and, as I argued in my piece summarizing the greater history of affiliate marketers, an investment this good may convince media conglomerates to divest from traditional journalism and pursue more marketing.
Rates Matter
I previously alleged that, despite the protestations of The Strategist and other marketers, the financial implications of affiliate marketing will sway the judgments of reviewers. They will recommend products not just based on their efficacy, but based on how much money they could make from the recommendation. One mechanism I proposed that would unfairly impact a marketer’s review is the rate that the advertising company offers the affiliate marketer. The size of an affiliate marketer’s commission does not matter to potential buyers, but it matters to the marketer’s bottom line. I alleged that, for example, should two sex toys offer a different commission for successful referrals, this differential would influence the decisions of reviewers and make them beholden to something other than the quality of the product.
Cho admits this freely: she thanks Skimlinks for helping them identify good rates. Evidence now backs my previous hunch, which at the time was but an unsubstantiated allegation. The rate speaks. It speaks to Cho, who speaks to editorial, who speaks to the writers, who speak to the unknowing readers.
Affiliate marketers work because their recommendations feel candid. The posturing they take is one of unbiased expertise. Per Cho, this is just posturing.