Understand How
Affiliates Programs Started
The concept of affiliate marketing on the Internet was developed
and patented by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts.
Launched on the Prodigy Network in 1989, PC Flowers & Gifts remained on the
service until 1996. Then By 1993, PC Flowers & Gifts generated sales in
excess of $6 million per year on the Prodigy service. In 1998, PC Flowers and
Gifts started to develop a business model by paying a commission on sales to
The Prodigy network.
In 1994, Tobin launched a beta version of PC Flowers &
Gifts on the Internet in cooperation with IBM, who owned half of Prodigy; check
out the “PC Week Article Jan 9, 1995”. Then in 1995 PC Flowers & Gifts had
launched a commercial version of the website and had more over 2000 affiliate
marketing partners on the World Wide Web. Tobin applied for a patent on
tracking and affiliate marketing on January 22, 1996 and he was issued U.S.
Patent number 6,141,666 on Oct 31, 2000. He also received Japanese Patent
number 4021941 on Oct 5, 2007 and U.S. Patent number 7,505,913 on Mar 17, 2009
for this affiliate marketing and tracking system. In July 1998 PC Flowers and
Gifts merged with Fingerhut and Federated Department Stores in 1999
On March 9, 2009 Tobin started his family foundation for Education
and Health. The Foundation started to license the patents to many of the Biggest
affiliate marketing companies in the US and Japan. Tobin discusses the P.C
Flowers & Gifts service on the Internet as well as the other companies he
has founded in his book entitled “Confessions of a Compulsive Entrepreneur and
Inventor”.
In November of 1994 Tobin started the concept of revenue
sharing—paying commission for referred business to the affiliate’s
marketing and the Internet entrepreneurs. The revenue share principles were
distributed on this year (1994), almost four years after the origination of the World
Wide Web.
One of the first companies was Cyber erotica that started the
affiliate marketing with a cost per click program.
Now in November 1994, Buy Web program was launched by CDNOW.
This company had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list
albums for their visitors that might be interested in purchasing. They started
to offer links directly and offering to purchase albums. This idea was
developed through the purchasing from the conversations with music label Geffen
Records in the fall of 1994. Geffen realized that CDNOW could link
directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the
CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.
Then Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in
July 1996: This program placed banner or text links on their site for
individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.
When visitors clicked from the associate's website to Amazon
and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the
first company developing this idea but offered an affiliate program, becoming widely
known programs.
In February 2000, Amazon got granted a patent on
components of an affiliate program. And it was submitted in June 1997. Now you
can see new company doing the same thing. If you are interested to learn more searches
in Conglo’s Directory for more affiliate programs, check out our affiliate programs
and advertisement on this page.
