UK Affiliate Cencus 2006
The UK Affiliate Census 2006 results are now in the public domain.First off, a huge thanks to Linus Gregoriadis over at e-consultancy.com whom without, this census could not have been achieved.
Big thanks to all the Networks who assisted us with sending out the initial survey to their network of affiliates, which included, PaidOnResults.com, Webgains.com,TradeDoubler.co.uk, OnlineMediaGroup.co.uk, SmartQuotes.net, ClashMedia.com , DGM.com and AffiliateWindow.com. Huge thanks to Matt Wood over at a4uforum.co.uk.
And all the bloggers that helped us spread the word. We would also like to thank our guinea pigs who trialled the survey and added comments.
Finally, a huge thanks to all the affiliates who participated in this census, you are all now a part of History and its some thing you can be very proud about. You are the engines of affiliate marketing in the UK (respect)
Wow what an achievement! Well done every one!
To download the Census, please go here
The purpose of this Census is to give the affiliate marketing industry a better understanding of affiliates, in terms of:Their profile (e.g. who they are and where they live).
Their lifestyle as affiliates.
The nature of their affiliate activity / business.
Their relationship with networks and merchants.
Their opinions about market trends.
We have called this survey an Affiliate Census because we believe it is the first attempt of its kind to carry out a comprehensive survey of affiliates across different networks.
Of course, we do not claim that every affiliate – or even the majority – have completed this survey but we are confident that enough affiliates have taken part to ensure that the results give an accurate reflection of affiliates and the views of this community as a whole.
In terms of the total number of UK affiliates, that is something which is difficult to ascertain, although we estimate that there are around 40,000 UK affiliates. This means that we have polled around 4% of all UK affiliates.
We hope the information contained in the report will be of great value not only to affiliates for the purposes of benchmarking themselves, but also to networks, merchants and anyone else with an interest in this thriving industry.
We hope to make this census either an annual occurrence, or possibly something which is repeated every two years. Please let us know if you have any feedback about this report and about how the census could be improved for future versions.
Jess Luthi, Affiliate Program Advice
Jess at affiliateprogramadvice.com
Linus Gregoriadis, Head of Research, E-consultancy
Linus at e-consultancy.com
A total of 1,536 affiliates completed an online survey over a six-week period in November and December 2006.
Information about the survey, including the link, was emailed to affiliates by networks mentioned in the acknowledgements section It was also publicised by the A4U Forum and affiliate bloggers.
The survey was open to any UK affiliate, i.e. affiliates doing business with UK networks / merchants. These affiliates do not necessarily live in the UK.
Those who completed the survey have been sent a link to the report in advance of its publication on the E-consultancy website.
My response to the Affiliate Census 06, will be split over a few articles and over a few days.
The first question that I am happy to answer “Why did some of the networks not participate?”.
One grandfather of a network did not participate, not because they did not want to but by the time they would have got it past their legal team they would have missed the boat, they will be included in all future census surveys. The rest had similar reasons to each other, they simply wanted to protect their network of affiliates, just in case. I am sure we will see them all participate in the next census.
The next question I am happy to answer is “Is the affiliate census skew because three of the UK networks did not participate?”. The answer, I believe is no. As we can see from the census in part 5.4, most affiliates belong to an average of three affiliate networks. I believe there was a fair proportional representation.
The next question I am happy to answer is “Why are there so few women affiliates?”.The Gender question was of particular interest to me not just because I am a woman but we have some great female role models in the industry. 83% of affiliates are men, Two CEO’s of two affiliate networks are women, Nicky Iapino of Affili.net and Diana Herriot of ClashMedia. So why are so few affiliate’s women? I see affiliate marketing as a great source of supplementary income, its one of the few industries where you can chose your own hours and work around child care. Perhaps women are put off by technology? I was talking to Elaine from allkids.co.uk about this, we agreed that if you can use a computer in terms of writing good content, you are half way there. It’s not that difficult! Are we, in the industry, over complicating things, perhaps the jargon is a barrier to entry? I asked Diane Drinkwater, active UK affiliate of moneyoffVouchers.co.uk and mum about affiliate marketing and how she got started, was there a correlation between parenting and work? She said, “I think that I fell in love with the internet as a research tool a couple of years before I started affiliate marketing. As a parent the flexibility of working for myself and doing affiliate marketing has been incredibly practical. I can fit in my hours around school time and term and take time off if my son is ill. It has its downside too though, a long summer holiday means that for 6 weeks I do next to no work! Hey, did I think that was a downside? I know many mums would love to work flexible hours with the most understanding boss out there, but you have to be very self-motivated and determined to fit in work into the hours available.”
Most common age bracket of UK affiliates is age 31 – 41 years old. Am I surprised by this? Yes, a little.. had this Census been done in 2000, then I may not have blinked twice. In 2000, computers were still an expensive toy and the internet was knee jerking its way into our homes and we were post millennium bug, See US Census PDF For the UK here . This answer challenged my stereotype of the modern day affiliate I thought to be a twenty something, techno savvy entrepreneurial type. The computer geek with SEO capabilities and programming skills. My stereotype was borne out of the many affiliate get 2 gethers I attend, forums I frequent and reinforced by the number of affiliates I know and work with. So it did come as a surprise that the majority of affiliates were between 31 and 41 years of age. I predict, with the emergence of myspace, youtube, blogger et al and other social networking sites, I expect the common age group to be a lot lower in the next census.How delighted was I to see that 4% off affiliates are over sixty years old. Again, I had thought this figure to be a lot lower. I would like to see this figure a lot higher in the next census, we know that the over sixties are becoming more computer savvy and according to the UK Security firm called prevention, an internet security website, “retired people now account for two-fifths of IT security purchases (in the home user market) in the UK, and that women are rapidly closing the gender gap. Within the ‘retired’ category women accounted for 53% of IT security software purchasers.” 2005 source prevention.
To surmise on 5.1 of the census, the information supplied whilst interesting merely highlighted a group of people in our community, that were clearly absent, women and senior citizens. We know that both groups are internet savvy, so where are they? What is missing from our industry that does not appeal to this segment of our society? Or what should we be doing to make this industry more enticing? This group should have a voice on the internet, their views and opinions count as they contribute to over half of all online spending, home and away.
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