Why don’t publishers use affiliate links for their subscription products?Let’s say I purchase a new vacuum and am really impressed with its quality. So I decide to write up a review of it and post it to my blog. Somewhere on my post I’ll include a link to where people can buy the vacuum, but rather than just pasting in the publicly-available Amazon link, I log into my Amazon affiliate account and grab a customized link that will give me credit for whenever someone clicks on it and purchases the vacuum. Every time that happens, I get a small percentage of the sale.What I’m describing is nothing novel; affiliate marketing has existed for over two decades and has provided a fantastic way for e-retailers and manufacturers to incentivize content creators into driving sales to their platforms. It’s so effective that many mainstream publishers have launched product-review verticals in an effort to capture this revenue.So here’s a question: why haven’t those same publishers utilized affiliate marketing to drive sales of their own subscription products?Let’s imagine another scenario: I read an article in The New York Times that’s relevant to my newsletter readers. Rather than simply grabbing the link from the address bar, I hit a button that generates a custom affiliate link so that when someone clicks on my link and converts into a paid subscriber of NYT, then I get some sort of payout.Think of the incentives that would generate for creators, influencers, and other media companies to link out to high-quality subscription content. Right now, whenever a big story breaks, it’s often reblogged and aggregated on lower-quality news sites. That results in a lot of social media users sharing a HuffPost article that’s basically summarizing a NYT scoop. This new policy would incentivize them to hunt down the original journalism and link directly to it. It would also incentivize the HuffPosts of the world to display links more prominently and actually drive more of their readers back to the original source material.Systems like this already exist in the newsletter space. Platforms like Paved, Swapstack, and Sparkloop launched marketplaces where any newsletter can list a price they’re willing to pay for each new subscriber; then any participating creator can grab that affiliate link, recommend the newsletter, and then get paid for every time someone signs up.But this system is mostly dedicated to free signups to newsletters — not paid subscriptions — and it hasn’t been widely adopted by mainstream outlets. Out of curiosity, I googled around for publisher affiliate programs and came across a few platforms I’d never heard of before. But overall, I don’t think any major publishers are offering the ability to create affiliate links to individual articles, which is still the best way to drive paid subscriptions.Is it just me, or is this a major missed opportunity?
Sehr gute Idee, Werbung durch klink