Comments:
With the release of our preview issue sampler, we are getting alot of questions and interests in our data.
I would like to take the opportunity now to explain the methodology in the data collection.
This information will be published in the first subscription issue as well.
The statistics presented in the journal were gathered from the spidering activities of Cydata Services. Project Black Book ("PBB") has an exclusive licensing arrangement to perform data analysis in their 1 Billions+ records database.
Cydata does spidering of the web, much like the googebots, and processes all spidered web pages for keyword indexing and linking relationships.
The affiliate network URLs are translated to show the actual merchant website (ie. the redirect).
On page 8 of the PDF (or the print version), is the first summary stat provided, which is on Azoogle Summary Stats.
The data presented:
Total number of links found: 39,686
Number of unique merchants: 4,735 (should have been typed out as merchant IDs)
Number of unique affiliate ID: 6,917
Number of affiliate domains: 8,131
Through the spidering of affiliate websites and parsing through all the linking relationships, the end data is shown.
The data was sampled from data from the last 8 months. In two weeks, Cydata is increasing its spidering to about 1M domains a day. This will allow the statistics to be timely and a summary of what was found in that month.
By increasing the spidering to monthly cycles, its possible to start to track new merchant products entering the space, and watching the popularity of that product as affiliates start to promote it.
Going back to the stats, we show 4,735 merchant IDs. These are unique merchant IDs, not number of merchants (sorry for the confusion in the stat). Next month, all the merchant IDs will be translated back to merchants (since merchants have multiple merchant IDs), and a new statistic will be tracked, that is the actual number of merchants.
We have found 6,917 affiliate IDs which were found on 8,131 unique domains. Affiliates can have multiple websites and have the same ID (and some may have multiple affiliate IDs).
Given a t3report.com on a merchant, the specific affiliate domains can be revealed along with summary linking data.
Jeff Molander writes on his blog:
Jeff writes:” Let’s compare high level statistics on Commission Junction versus Linkshare versus MyAffiliateProgram (Kowabunga). “
As people are looking at the stats, I am suggesting that they don’t make number comparison judgements per se, since the spidering was done across 4M or so domains over the last 8 months, and is really a sampling. Each data should be looked at individually by the network in putting things in context.
It is fair to look at the number of affiliates who are in the Network and promoting which domains which is some very interesting and never-before-seen data.
Jeff writes: “Not to rain on this publication�s parade (who me?) but, in the end, do marketers care enough about affiliate programs to Project Black Book publication like this for $350 to $500 (starting August 1) per year? “
That is the $50,000 question, I mean the $350/yr question, of will marketers subscribe. There is plenty of case precedent of industry newsletters that range from several hundred to several thousand dollars.
Marketers already invest in market research from companies like Jupiter, Forrester, Gartner,etc.
Marketing consultants are hired to help navigate the waters.
“Knowledge is power”, and necessary to have in order to make good business and marketing decisions.
Jeff writes:” Is this kind of data combined with the type of content they�re showcasing enough to compete with the likes of Revenue Magazine?”
We don’t see PBB as competing with Revenue. PBB is subscription based (high end) and advertisers are not the main focus. Advertisers can sometimes wield political power of the almighty Ad Dollars to have content/articles not be written or softened.
Since PBB is not beholden to advertisers, we can be very direct and to the point.
Our main focus is on merchants who are in the affiliate marketing space or those looking to get into the space. Some type of affiliates might also be interested, so we are all up to the challenge of providing insightful articles and interesting data.