LinkShare Launches Hybrid Pricing Option in Affiliates Program

LinkShare Corp. in New York City, which
hosts a network of e-commerce sites, has developed a hybrid pricing option for
its affiliates program.

Through LinkShare’s proprietary affiliate network, online merchants can now offer to pay sites for ads using a mixture of different pricing structures including Cost per Impression, Cost per Click, Cost per Lead and Cost per
Sale.

This new option allows merchants to compensate affiliates for the value that
they provide at each stage of the sales process. The hybrid pricing structure
also offers merchants a new means to increase participation in their
affiliates programs while keeping control of customer acquisition costs.
LinkShare said it is the first and only company to offer a hybrid pricing
structure.

“Although often providing a valuable service, affiliates currently bear all
the risk in pure revenue sharing arrangements,” said Stephen Messer, LinkShare
chief executive officer. “LinkShare recognized early on that a hybrid pricing
structure was necessary to provide both merchants and affiliates with the
means to strike partnerships with the appropriate incentives. As technology to
implement and track the necessary data decreases in cost and grows in
acceptance, both advertisers and affiliate sites will realize an advantage in
moving from the basic CPM model to the hybrid model. The hybrid model is the
future of customer acquisition and product branding.”

The LinkShare Network has grown to exceed 6,000 content sites and currently
consists of more than 100 online merchants, including FAO Schwarz, Reader’s
Digest, Avon, Omaha Steaks, Fashionmall.com, Shades.com, Brookstone, Virtual
Vineyards and major content providers such as Lycos, Prodigy and MasterCard’s
StoreSearch.