Click Z Network
Friday, June 9, 2000
By Joel Gehman

To most people, affiliate marketing is about a few scattered links from web sites to merchants. Think books from Amazon, movies from Reel.com, clothing from Lands' End and electronics from Hifi.com. However, affiliate networks, merchants and even some new entrants are pushing affiliate marketing to be ever more context-centric.

The idea is obvious enough. Move product placement closer to the point of interest, and more people will buy. It's that whole "right message, right place, right time" thing. Let's take a look...

Silicon Alley start-up Yo.com just finished raising an undisclosed round of financing. Web software giant Macromedia and three venture capital groups apparently agreed with Yo's vision for building a personalization-driven, affiliate marketing network. Yo intends to use Macromedia's LikeMinds collaborative filtering software as the back-end for its collaborative filtering, sales and marketing network. For example, when an affiliate replaces its static "click to buy" link with a Yo Box, Yo serves a number of impressions. Some of them are control impressions � generalized sales pitches. Some of them are personalized messages. Yo gets paid by merchants based on the difference in conversion rates between the control impressions and those generated by collaborative filtering.