Research Questions

Bruner (2004) claims, that since 2004 it has become more difficult for merchants to advertise at the websites of attractive content providers. With the evolution of new types of online advertising and growing interest in online advertising, content providers have more options to choose from (ibid.).

While the advantages of affiliate marketing for merchants are theoretically defined (for instance Gallaugher et al., 2001; Hoffman & Novak, 2000; Chatterjee, 2002), benefits for content providers are not described properly. As Libai et al. note, content providers accept risk connected with employing affiliate marketing (Libai, Biyalogorsky, Gerstner, 2003). However, the question, why and when they prefer to take the risk instead of using other types of online advertising, has not been answered so far.

In order to cover the research purpose and characterize the usage of affiliate marketing by content providers, we need to find out, what persuade content providers to use affiliate marketing, how their usage starts and finally, when they prefer affiliate marketing to other types of online advertising.

Thus, this work aims to clarify the key benefits that persuade content providers to prefer affiliate marketing. As such assessment can be very subjective, this study will focus at content providers' perception of these benefits. By perception we mean judgments that people make when characterizing and evaluating their activities (Slovic, 1987). Moreover, the situations, when affiliate marketing is more beneficial for content providers, will be studied. The first and second research questions are therefore formulated as follows:

Was this article helpful?