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Banner by Coty Polk (http://www.cotypolk.com/)

Part 1 of 2.

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We live in an era of simplifying games (and therefore often stripping them of their interesting features), greedy developers feeding on unfinished products, shady business practices (sometimes revolving around world politics) and general surfeit of available products. In order to find a significant and memorable gaming experience one must - more than once - turn his eyes toward things created not by the professionals, but Players themselves.
Due to a non-commercial and purely hobbyist nature of such ventures, they often come around unnoticed and underappreciated. Among them is Ultima Online: Requiem. In order to fix the unforgivably small range that the project is known in (and to know it better myself), I’ve decided to interview the Requiem’s Team Leader, Sicarius.
The idea behind it is very similar to my previous interview with Vanilla+’s Vladmir. Please note, that aside from the chat with Sicarius, I’m in no other way involved in the project’s development, neither have I received any form of payment or compensation, be it in game or in real life.
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Voidwards: Hello again, Sic. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. How about you introduce yourself and the rest of the Team?
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Thanks for taking the time to do this for us, Void. As you’ve already said, I’m the lead developer and team lead for Requiem. I’ve been involved in the UO community since the original boxed release of Ultima Online: Renaissance way back in April of 2000. I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of the UO role-playing community since the early days, having cut my teeth originally on the OSI shards Lake Superior (shout out to CWS and UDL) and Siege Perilous, and eventually moving to the player-ran community circuit once the OSI roleplaying communities began to migrate away from official shards after OSI phased out the Seer program.
After spending a good amount of time running around the community RP shards for a while with my group of friends and guildmates, a group of us took a crack at trying to develop our own shard and community that sought to cater to a different niche of roleplaying and atmosphere than what was commonly available out there at the time. Those early efforts snowballed and persisted through over fifteen years, and have ultimately led us to where we are today; the pending release of Requiem: Act VI.
As for our development staff, our current team for this iteration of our project consists of six core members of whom each have a unique skill set that play to the collaborative nature of our project well. Starting with the members that have been with us the longest, my co-admin Rex is a phenomenal self-taught programmer who works with me to conjure up our custom take on traditional UO elements, and is also our lead liaison for other development communities and projects. Our senior Gamemaster Alt has been with us for longer than I can remember and is also our lead map developer and decorator, and is one of the most talented mappers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Co-admin Maldonado has been with us for years and leads our in-game development and balancing, and does a phenomenal job to help translate our programming efforts in developing spawns and NPCs into enjoyable and balanced in-game content. He also serves as a check-and-balance over the final revisions of developed content that Rex and I work on to ensure that it’s actually fun, intuitive and can be considered balanced enough to implement to the project.

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A public hanging shows how brutal and unforgiving the world of Requiem is. / by Jeremold
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Our newest members to our team include Archin, who is our lead art asset developer and is a phenom when it comes to creating, developing and implementing custom assets and art to the project. Her addition to the staff has helped us take our project to an entirely new level for this latest iteration of the shard, and I’m truly excited to see the community be able to appreciate her work here soon. In addition to her direct development contributions, she has also elected to work on promotional video marketing, and also personally curates and performs quality assurance over in-game aesthetic content (for example, clothing, equipment and hair hues) to ensure things adhere to our level of aesthetic quality. She has essentially become our lead asset manager and we couldn’t be happier with her contributions during development.
Along with Archin, Coty (https://www.cotypolk.com/) is also a new addition to our development team and is a very talented traditional and digital artist, of which we’re thrilled about having on the team. He has been able to take some of our conceptual ideas and put them to canvas, helping us develop new branding for the project as well as developing and implementing custom aesthetics and equipment for the game world. He has also proved to be an amazing conceptual developer and has personally spearheaded the development of a few of our new systems of this iteration of the project, and we’re very fortunate to have talent like his adding to the team of Requiem.
In addition to our core development team, we also draw heavily from our community for assistance. We operate a community development team that we’ve invited dedicated veterans of our community to (shout out to Burz and Cons!) that help us with development tasks, balancing and design workshopping. We’ve also have a group of community volunteers that help us out with the arduous and meticulous task of map development and decoration, and a few members whom contribute to the project with helping us out with our wiki, contributing lore, and even contributing music to use in-game (thanks LE!).

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Not all of our Readers have experienced UO firsthand. Can you give us your description of the game, in general?
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Ultima Online is one of the earliest MMOs and originally launched in 1997 to fairly decent popularity. I believe at its peak, it had around a quarter of a million paying subscribers. While that might sound a little low compared to the massive numbers games like World of Warcraft draw today, it’s touted as being the very first MMORPG to reach the 100,000 subscriber mark, and really blew a lot of the other early MMOs out of the water. In its prime, it was truly something special and new; one of the first real popular entries into a genre that was just starting to break ground with PC gamers. MMOs were so new back then that the idea of subscribing monthly to anything - let alone a video game - over the internet was still something that wasn’t at all mainstream.

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Refurbished Claimed Fort - First Province.
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What made Ultima Online fairly interesting for its time was that it launched as a true sandbox world; there hadn’t been many quests aside from escorting some Seekers of Adventurers around from town to town for a bit of gold, and any content outside of PvM was created by the players themselves. NPC vendors were limited, and the concepts of things such as reputation grinding for end-game loot simply weren’t ideas back then - to get good gear, you had to seek out players and their shops all over the map.
Ultima’s aesthetic and game-engine choices had also lent itself to being something rather unique, even to this day, as the game engine is rendered in an isometric perspective just like early Infinity Engine RPGs, Diablo and Path of Exile, every piece of artwork in Ultima is hand-drawn, and even the animations themselves are illustrated frames of artwork as opposed to 3D models. While over the years many games have found more efficient ways of making games and handling equipment and models, UO’s art choices have kept it charming enough that it still ages well as opposed to early 3D games that suffered from simple models and low-res textures.
When Origin originally designed UO, they seemed to have had a focus on semi-realism and immersion as guiding principles of their game design. For example, everything in the game world was represented as an item that could be placed on the ground, thrown away, stored in a chest or traded with another player - there were no generic “bag” models for some items the developers didn’t make art for. Building upon that idea, PvP was both meaningful and dangerous; if you lost a fight, odds were you lost everything you had on you, to include armor, weapons, gold, bandages and even the dining room furniture you might have been carrying back from the local vendor. For such an early entry into the genre of MMOs, the game design decisions had really captured a lot of people’s imaginations and interest, as they all culminated together to form something almost like a “middle-ages life” simulator.

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Fort Praesidium. A solid protection against the horrors of the wilderness, but not that much against the things that occur within the settlement's walls.
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The belief that I have that early UO was as much a sim as it was a MMO is further reinforced by the original creators work on UO’s character development systems - where most MMOs nowadays are class or role based, UO had around 50 seperate skills that were rated on a proficiency level from zero to one-hundred percent, which you raised mainly through use, such as hitting a monster with a sword to raise your Swordsmanship skill. You could have any combination of these skills, up to a 700% total cap, at any time. You could also raise and lower these skills whenever it suited you or your playstyle. You also had to raise your stats, Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence, through use and development of these skills. There were no levels or experience points, just you with a sword or a fishing pole trying to raise your skills up. Throw in a few craft skills which gave players the ability to not only craft traditional MMO gear such as weapons and armor, but also more “RP” items like furniture, clothing, musical instruments and food that existed almost solely for decorative purposes, and you were left with an truly unique and compelling game experience that wasn’t like anything else that had ever been on the market at the time. For many of us that cut our teeth with UO, it was an experience that has yet to have ever been recreated faithfully in games that have come after it, and that’s probably why the game’s emulation scene is still active to this very day.

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Aren't you afraid that the original game's age could discourage some of your audience? How does such an aged production translate into modern trends and our understanding of game development in 2021?
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I think a lot of the early design decisions that went into the initial creation of Ultima Online have helped keep it relevant as a medium for what we on the team of Requiem try to do best; the support of enforced roleplaying. The isometric perspective, the art decisions, the free-form gameplay and sandbox elements of the base-game all come together to make a really strong foundation for a project like ours.
Where we can truly achieve modernization and keeping the game relevant is through taking advantage of the community that exists to support and further player-ran UO development. Combining the game’s base foundation with the larger community efforts of private server emulation (such as RunUO and ServUO) along with the excellent work of the ClassicUO client emulation scene (a project that has modernized and expanded UO’s client with new quality of life features for a modern era), we’re able to update and expand upon a twenty year-old game with modern game design decisions and features. We’re not just limited to editing a game through config files and settings when developing our project; we’re actually able to use UO as more of a game engine to house any and every idea our development team can conceptualize and create. Using C# and modern art and asset development tools, we’ve been able to develop and implement new skills, completely custom mechanics, new art assets to include UI updates, new animations, and even custom sounds and music. Only our imagination (and time!) is the limit, and we’ve really taken advantage of this fact with Requiem.

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Item Lore window showcases a stepforward mechanics compared to the original game, as well as some of the custom interface artwork.
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Ultima Online in of itself is also a title that has still remained operational as a live product for more than twenty years now too. It has seen numerous updates, expansions, upgrades and content additions. Our entire development team are also avid MMO fans and have collectively played together in modern numerous titles, ranging from mainstream games such as WoW, all the way to more niche projects such as Life is Feudal. All in all, while the spirit of UO is very old soul so to say, it is not a direct transplant from the late 90s, and neither is the development team working on this project.

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All right, but what’s the main concept of Requiem? How does it differ from the “default” Ultima Online?
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“Default” Ultima Online is in itself a sandbox MMO in which players are expected to seek out and create their own content, be it anything from harvesting and crafting, fighting monsters and exploring the map, or waylaying unexpecting travelers and striking them down for their belongings. In the early heyday of UO, the idea of structured quests, reputation farming or even raids did not exist. MMOs have come a long way since the early days of UO, and while Requiem owes its DNA to UO, we have tried to lean more heavily into modern game design philosophies than those of the late 90s.

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Original Ultima Online's character profile. Despite its charm, not very eye-pleasing these days.
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As for the concept of Requiem, I’d say that is two-fold. First, Requiem is a project based around the ideas of providing to the community an enforced role-playing environment in which every element of the project, from it’s aesthetics to it’s mechanics, are designed in mind for such an activity. We have sought to establish a community in which we’re not just modding Ultima Online, but creating our own take on it, imagining if it had followed a path that focused upon intricate, pen and paper inspired character development and an enforced role-playing environment.
A very small example of this design philosophy that comes to mind immediately are our player profiles. In traditional Ultima Online, role-players were given a small profile window to tell a little about their character, be it their immediate appearance or their back story. On Requiem, this is taken to a much more intricate level of detail; we provide to our players the means to write and save profiles of their characters and to choose graphical avatars that represent their facial features. You can then use a simple command or menu option to look at any player-character in the game and get a window that shows to you the basic bodily attributes the player’s character chose for their persona, such as height and weight, along with their description and character Avatar artwork. While such a feature might sound like a minor thing at first glance, we’ve found that these small quality of life additions help promote and propagate role-playing in our community, and leads to more immersion and more fun.

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Requiem's character codex, along with one of the many available avatars.
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The second half of Requiem’s overall concept is its story, which has been running more or less for the better part of fifteen years. Where default Ultima Online really didn’t have that much of an overall story outside of founding lore and plot, Requiem is far different. In order for us to have an enforced role-playing environment, players have to know what sort of world their characters are a part of. For Requiem, that world is one that is heavily inspired by a low to medium fantasy concept that draws upon the spirit of Lovecraftian horror, the genre of Grimdark fantasy, and the horror elements of IPs like Diablo. While a lot of people instantly think of knights in shining armor, lithe and beautiful elves, Arthorian legends and the round table, and epic battles against building-sized dragons when they think of medieval enforced roleplaying, Requiem is quite a different beast. The world at large, Eden, is about thirty years into what many believe is the Apocalypse, and large swaths of the Venerated Republic of Decus, the story’s main setting, are consumed by mindless hordes of the undead. Knights and elves are replaced with Templar and Inquisitors scouring the lands for enemies of the Church and Faith, and building-sizes dragons have been traded our for sentient mounds of viscera, hordes of shambling zombies, and daemonic cambions whom stalk the countryside, stalking and hunting unsuspecting adventurers for sport.

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You have mentioned – be it on Discord or in the forum posts – that most of your playerbase are grown people with professional and personal responsibilities leading to a very limited amount of time available for playing. How does it relate to the fact that it’s an enforced RP server, full of player-led factions, Game Master-driven, Player-supported events and the world is really living, even when the Player’s offline? Shouldn’t we be afraid of falling behind: both mechanically and story-wise?
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This is a great question, and we’ve put a lot of thought into how to support a community that can feel accessible and fair to a spectrum of players, ranging from those who can devote a lot of time in-game and to those that can't. First and foremost, from a mechanical standpoint, our philosophy and game design concerning how a player develops their character is influenced heavily by the concept that if they have become a part of our community, they are by nature a part of our story. Thus, characters have lives of their own that are independent from the physical time their players may be able to devote to them. It can be very discouraging as a player to know that you only have two or three hours to jump in the game and have some fun knowing that you're hundreds of hours behind your peers in terms of mechanical character development.
What we have done with our core mechanics on Requiem to help alleviate these issues is the creation of a parallel character development system that exists in tandem with our more traditional mechanics. Known as our Animus system, characters in our game world earn a passive stipend of experience that can be spent to invest in nearly anything related to the development and progression of your character. This includes skill points, stat points, and even special skill abilities. Acquisition of this experience happens every hour, and it’s given a generous bonus depending on a few different factors to include how many other players are online at the time, and more importantly, a bonus if your character is within a local hot-spot that is used for role-playing, such as a tavern or a safe town. What this does is allow for players to spend their time as they see fit - even if you only have an hour or two to log in for the night, if you’d rather spend it just role-playing and catching up on the latest rumors, you won’t be completely neglecting the progression of your character while you do so. This system is extended to offline characters as well, for a period of up to two weeks, so if you have a busy week and can’t make it in-game until the weekend, you still have some built up Animus waiting for you to spend on raising a skill or purchasing some skill abilities. We think that with the incorporation of these two development ideas, our players are able to still make forward progression with their characters regardless of how much time they may be able to devote to being in-game in a given day or week.

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A player-made propaganda poster for one of the ingame factions. Eavesdropping and spying commonly occur in this dangerous world. / by Wyrmlance
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The Animus system is also intertwined with everything else in-game that you can do, such as crafting, harvesting, exploration, and even hunting and slaying monsters and animals. Perhaps your ideal character is a legendary blacksmith that sits around town honing his trade in the public craft hall, considering that you don't have the time to go out and explore every inch of the map and claim dominion over every foe you come across. In many other games and UO shards, pure progression through harvesting and crafting would be very hard - in Requiem, it’s easily achievable through our Animus system. You can even use all of that experience your blacksmith has been earning to raise other skills, such as Swordsmanship, allowing you to role-play the idea that in his free time, your character has been taking lessons from a local expert or some such idea. What this does is allow our players to progress in a way that feels comfortable to them. Of course, natural progression through skill gain is still a thing too - and for those players that have a ton of time to devote to playing, the Animus system starts to have diminishing returns within a twenty-four hour period, as to keep things fair for all.

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New wearables available for Act VI. Customization, baby!
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Falling behind with the story-line is a whole different problem, one in which we’ve also taken proactive steps to try and prepare for. First, any major storyline quest or event that our staff holds is held to a standard of requiring at least a week or two lead-time and out-of-character notification to the player base so people can plan accordingly - this gives everyone a chance to try and make it to our big events. Second, we have incorporated a means for our Faction leaders to be able to plan and advertise their own in-game events through in-client tools that allow the rest of the playerbase know when something might be going on or is planned. This allows our players to facilitate communication between themselves in regards to organizing and planning events big or small. Lastly, we have numerous mediums that we use to communicate to the shard what is going on with the story - this includes in-game newspapers, forum update threads, and most importantly our Living Story concept, which is a narratively written novella that we develop and publish to our website that explains our main plot and what the players have done to influence and affect the outcomes of our own internal and confidential plans for the story. This part is especially fun for us on staff, as we’ve a lot of ideas for where we want to go with the story, and depending on what the players do and accomplish in-game, those plans can go right out the window.

Part 2 coming soon.

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Website: https://www.13thrones.com/wordpress/
Discord: http://discord.gg/RmWKqTD
Forums: https://www.13thrones.com/forums

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https://preview.redd.it/beoe5etyukf61.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=f53341f4d33b0b2c7ccbbc785b91309d31bc11af
Game of Thralls (PC, RPVP, 18+) Conflict-driven, highly immersive https://discord.gg/TNVMYfe
GoT has had a presence on CE since August 2018. Our focus is deep and high quality multiplayer role-play. All sorts of characters are invited into the fray. We welcome the bard, the farmer and the tavern-goer as much as we do the ruthless sorcerer, the blood thirsty barbarian and the vengeful villain.
We've had 23 new characters join us in the last two weeks. On Game of Thralls, you'll find a wide variety of active storylines.
Our players are expected to have the maturity to handle the dark and adult themes of role-play in the Conan universe. We use an application process to ensure all players and their characters fit our concept.
We offer limited supernatural race options and a lore abiding sorcery system for our experienced players but it should be remembered that the worst monsters are often in human minds. Our server lore is based on the works of Robert E. Howard, enriched by the expanded lore of the 2004 Conan RPG by Mongoose Publishing Ltd. All the materials and books are available in our discord.
Server Settings

• Max capacity 70
• Server is UK based, good ping from both EU and US
• Players and staff from EU, UK and US
• Drop on Death enabled
• Avatars disabled
• Purges disabled
• Containers Ignore Ownership
• Structure decay off
• XP rate: 1.5X (for Followers, Players get lvl 60 kits)
• Gathering rate: 2X

Example Rules:

• No offline raiding
• PVP/hostile actions must have an IC reason
• Roleplay/lore considerations > game mechanics
• Permadeath is possible
• Buildings must be realistic and culturally appropriate

Mod List [Pippi][ADHS][ExilesExtreme][ThrallWars][Emberlight][Warrior Mutator] [Item Stat Remover][Northern Timber][Barbarian Surgeon] [Barbarian Barber][Akuba’s Salon][RA] [Immersive Armor][Fashionist][Ravencrest Couriers][Reduce Rain][LBPR][Server Mod] [Devious Desires][IQoL]

Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts
Structure
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https://preview.redd.it/a9a3eqlt1af61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61f74881b6051dc4fe4bb1d9e8f748cf2ea6dc0a
The industry has four core players
the merchant (also known as 'advertiser' or 'retailer' or 'brand')
the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments)
the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate')
the customer
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The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates, and specialized third party vendors
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing, and (in some sense) display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and web site syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies
History
Origin
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The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened in November 1994, almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web
The concept of affiliate marketing on the Internet was conceived of, put into practice and patented by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. Launched on the Prodigy Network in 1989, PC Flowers & Gifts remained on the service until 1996. By 1993, PC Flowers & Gifts generated sales in excess of $6 million per year on the Prodigy service. In 1998, PC Flowers and Gifts developed the business model of paying a commission on sales to the Prodigy Network
The concept of affiliate marketing on the Internet was conceived of, put into practice and patented by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. Launched on the Prodigy Network in 1989, PC Flowers & Gifts remained on the service until 1996. By 1993, PC Flowers & Gifts generated sales in excess of $6 million per year on the Prodigy service. In 1998, PC Flowers and Gifts developed the business model of paying a commission on sales to the Prodigy Network
By 1995 PC Flowers & Gifts had launched a commercial version of the website and had 2,600 affiliate marketing partners on the World Wide Web. Tobin applied for a patent on tracking and affiliate marketing on January 22, 1996, and was issued U.S. Patent number 6,141,666 on Oct 31, 2000. Tobin also received Japanese Patent number 4021941 on Oct 5, 2007, and U.S. Patent number 7,505,913 on Mar 17, 2009, for affiliate marketing and tracking
In July 1998 PC Flowers and Gifts merged with Fingerhut and Federated Department Stores
In November 1994, CDNow launched its BuyWeb program. CDNow had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors might be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take visitors directly to CDNow to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose from conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CD's directly from its website but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNow if it could design a program where CDNow would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNow could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNow home page and going directly to an artist's music page
Amazon launched its associate program in July 1996: Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page
When visitors clicked on the associate's website to go to Amazon and purchase a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely known and serve as a model for subsequent programs
In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent on components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts (October 1994), AutoWeb (October 1995), Kbkids/BrainPlay (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others
Historic development
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Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005
MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs
In 2006, the most active sectors for affiliate marketing were the adult gambling, retail industries and file-sharing services
The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors
Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix
Web 2.0
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Websites and services based on Web 2.0 concepts—blogging and interactive online communities, for example—have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. These platforms allow improved communication between merchants and affiliates. Web 2.0 platforms have also opened affiliate marketing channels to personal bloggers, writers, and independent website owners. Contextual ads allow publishers with lower levels of web traffic to place affiliate ads on websites
Forms of new media have also diversified how companies, brands, and ad networks serve ads to visitors. For instance, YouTube allows video-makers to embed advertisements through Google's affiliate network
New developments have made it more difficult for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency
Compensation methods
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Predominant compensation methods
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Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or pay per sale (PPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM, cost per estimated 1000 views)
Diminished compensation methods
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Within more mature markets, less than one percent of traditional affiliate marketing programs today use cost per click and cost per mille. However, these compensation methods are used heavily in display advertising and paid search.
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Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his or her website and display it to the page visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher: A visitor must not only be made aware of the advertisement but must also click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's website.
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Cost per click was more common in the early days of affiliate marketing but has diminished in use over time due to click fraud issues very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising programs are not considered in the statistic pertaining to the diminished use of cost per click, as it is uncertain if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing.
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While these models have diminished in mature e-commerce and online advertising markets they are still prevalent in some more nascent industries. China is one example where Affiliate Marketing does not overtly resemble the same model in the West. With many affiliates being paid a flat "Cost Per Day" with some networks offering Cost Per Click or CPM.
Performance/affiliate marketing
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In the case of cost per mille/click, the publisher is not concerned about whether a visitor is a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission. This leaves the greater, and, in case of cost per mille, the full risk and loss (if the visitor cannot be converted) to the advertiser.
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Cost per action/sale methods require that referred visitors do more than visit the advertiser's website before the affiliate receives a commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest of the affiliate to send the most closely targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk is absorbed by the affiliate who funnels their traffic to the campaign (normally a landing page). In the case a conversion is not fired the publisher won't receive any compensation for the traffic.
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Affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how sales employees are typically being compensated. Such employees are typically paid a commission for each sale they close, and sometimes are paid performance incentives for exceeding objectives
Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.
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The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not completely accurate. The primary difference between the two is that affiliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advertiser's website. The sales team of the advertiser, however, does have the control and influence up to the point where the prospect either a) signs the contract, or b) completes the purchase.
Multi-tier programs
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Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. In practical terms, publisher "A" signs up to the program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher "A" attracts publishers "B" and "C" to sign up for the same program using his sign-up code, all future activities performed by publishers "B" and "C" will result in additional commission (at a lower rate) for publisher "A".
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Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond two-tier resemble multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing but are different: Multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing associations tend to have more complex commission requirements/qualifications than standard affiliate programs.
From the advertiser's perspective
Advantages for merchants
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Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost)
Implementation options
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Some merchants run their own (in-house) affiliate programs using dedicated software, while others use third-party intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. There are two different types of affiliate management methods used by merchants: standalone software or hosted services, typically called affiliate networks. Payouts to affiliates or publishers can be made by the networks on behalf of the merchant, by the network, consolidated across all merchants where the publisher has a relationship with and earned commissions or directly by the merchant itself.
Affiliate management and program management outsourcing
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Uncontrolled affiliate programs aid rogue affiliates, who use spamming, trademark infringement, false advertising, cookie stuffing, typosquatting, and other unethical methods that have given affiliate marketing a negative reputation.
Some merchants are using outsourced (affiliate) program management (OPM) companies, which are themselves often run by affiliate managers and network program managers
OPM companies perform affiliate program management for the merchants as a service, similar to the role an advertising agencies serves in offline marketing
Types of affiliate websites
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Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
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Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
Price comparison service websites and directories
Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward or incentive system for purchases via points, miles, cash back
Cause Related Marketing sites that offer charitable donations
Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
Personal websites
Weblogs and websites syndication feeds
E-mail marketing list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated with their own network of affiliates
Websites using adbars (e.g. AdSense) to display context-sensitive advertising for products on the site
Virtual currency that offers advertising views in exchange for a handout of virtual currency in a game or other virtual platform.
File-Sharing: Web sites that host directories of music, movies, games and other software. Users upload content to file-hosting sites and then post descriptions of the material and their download links on directory sites. Uploaders are paid by the file-hosting sites based on the number of times their files are downloaded. The file-hosting sites sell premium download access to the files to the general public. The websites that host the directory services sell advertising and do not host the files themselves.
Video sharing websites: YouTube videos are often utilized by affiliates to do affiliate marketing. A person would create a video and place a link to the affiliate product they are promoting in the video itself and within the description.
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Publisher recruitment
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Affiliate networks that already have several advertisers typically also have a large pool of publishers. These publishers could be potentially recruited, and there is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program on their own, without the need for recruitment efforts by the advertiser.
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Relevant websites that attract the same target audiences as the advertiser but without competing with it are potential affiliate partners as well. Vendors or existing customers can also become recruits if doing so makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations (such as with pyramid schemes).
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Almost any website could be recruited as an affiliate publisher, but high traffic websites are more likely interested in (for their sake) low-risk cost per mille or medium-risk cost per click deals rather than higher-risk cost per action or revenue share deals
affiliate marketing
https://arzunkadeh.com/affiliate-marketing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
https://partnernetwork.ebay.com/
https://ads.alibaba.com/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/