From Ford's Model T to McDonald's hamburgers, business innovation is often more about process than product. Even Google, a company synonymous with innovation, didn't invent search engines or search-relevant text ads. It figured out how to make them work beautifully, for better customer results (and nearly US$9 billion in 2009 profits).
In recent years we've watched Google plow its profits back into innovative technologies with varying degrees of business success. But Google's new Google Ventures division may have hit on another great money-spinning business: a San Francisco start-up company called VigLink that promises to re-invent affiliate marketing so every content site can profit from it.
Think about the kind of things you're into on the net: games, cars, restaurants, travel destinations etc. There's a lot of commerce linked to all that web content. Affiliate marketing can monetise that traffic by rewarding outbound links. Amazon.com has figured out how to sign up content sites with affiliate marketing deals better than anyone. For many site partners it adds up to serious cash. But managing multiple affiliate deals can be time-consuming for small sites, and in countries like Australia where e-commerce is just beginning to take off, affiliate marketing is barely out of the starting gates.
By aggregating and simplifying affiliate marketing, VigLink could change the game. Right now VigLink is signing up a range of existing affiliate programs. Then it plans to offer content publishers a service where they just add a few lines of JavaScript to their sites to automatically transform ordinary links into affiliate links.
Here's how Venture Beat magazine sums it up:
"VigLink isn’t the first company to offer something like this — it’s competing with a London start-up called SkimLinks. But [VigLink founder] Oliver Roup argued that there are some key differences, such as VigLink’s Silicon Valley location and connections, plus the fact that content publishers don’t suffer if VigLink’s infrastructure goes through the occasional start-up hiccups — if the company’s servers go down, its links still work. Roup compares the service to Google AdSense, in that it can be a good fit for both large and small websites....'By buying and selling small items that didn’t seem to be worth a lot initially, we could create a real link economy here.'”
One of the few sure things on the web is that useful, relevant content will always be in demand. VigLink's plans for re-inventing affiliate marketing could turn billions of content site hyperlinks into a business model to watch.