Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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Once upon a time, school fundraiser sites as affiliates were ubiquitous. I first came across the crowded school rewards affiliates back in 1999 when I was writing an article for Refer-it.com on affiliate marketing as a school fundraiser.

Over time, many of the names from back then faded away. But one that still remains is SchoolPop.com.

There was an interesting development today as kids around the U.S. are buying their school supplies, clothes and other fun stuff to head back to school.

Rakuten USA, parent company of LinkShare, has purchased CauseLoyalty.com, owner of SchoolPop and OneCause, as reported by Kellie Stevens via a Tweet.

Kellie goes into more details on her blog…

“Another affiliate has been bought by a company which also owns a major Affiliate Network. This is the second such acquisition by LinkShare. In June of this year, LinkShare acquired TrafficStrategies.com. ValueClick has made similar acquisitions, most notably the purchase of PriceRunner and MeziMedia. Performics is being bought by Google (ok that one isn’t an affiliate but there is AdSense and Google moving into the CPA arena). ThinkPartnership owns KowaBunga, SecondBite (an affiliate with access to merchant’s shopping carts and customer contact information) and PrimaryAds.”

An interesting point Kellie brings up is the conflict of interest, and whether affiliate networks are still truly the trusted third parties they were once touted to be.

Either way, it is a sort of bizarre thing when affiliate networks directly or indirectly become affiliates.

Evolution or a weird gray area?

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