WHO BEARS THE RISK ON THE MORPHING REVSHARE LANDSCAPE: framing the discussion
Who bears the risk….the advertiser or the publisher in a revenue share or traditional bounty-based, affiliate deal? Obviously, the publisher and I’m the first to admit for the publisher, this seems a bit dicey.
The theme of who should bear the risk runs through ReveNews appropriately enough. The heart of the issue is that advertisers want a pay-for-performance, direct response channel while publishers want to be paid on a Cost-per-Impression (CPM) or Cost-per-Click (CPC) basis as opposed to a Cost-per-Action (CPA) basis. It’s easy to understand both points of view.
In the nascent days of affiliate marketing, all the risk was on the publisher. But over the past few years, publishers have learned to mitigate the risks of affiliate programs in various ways. Publishers have found working through various CPA (Adteractive and Metareward), CPC (AdSense and Vibrant Media), or CPM (Tribal Fusion) publisher networks to be an effective approach to manage the risks. Also, in some cases, the smartest publishers now demand a true revenue share deal from advertisers with payments on residual revenue or a CPC deal. The affiliate marketing landscape has clearly evolved. (As a note, both Brian Clark and Wayne Porter and I have all written on this topic.
I’ve have written a series of entries on how the affiliate marketing landscape has changed over the past few years as publishers have figured out ways to mitigate the risks of a straight affiliate programs while at the same time optimizing rewards if publishers choose to leverage rev share and affiliate marketing partnerships to drive revenue.
First up: Commission Junction and effectiveCPC/EPC
Stay Tuned!
