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It was 1999 when I first began looking for ways to make money from a website I was building on the world wide web. I had until then only ever published a few stories and poems on Angelfire (now owned by Tripod or Lycos I think, maybe, but the same sort of thing either way). I didn't get money from it but there were adverts on it and the people who owned it certainly made money.

Before long I'd left university and got my own hosting at a friend's hosting company, and although I still only had ftp access, I was starting to do things more complex than just using a web-based web-page "publisher".

At this stage I had a website, and it doesn't matter what it was selling, frankly I won't tell you because it exists again now and is growing huge and I don't intend to share commercial secrets with you, and I wanted to get some money off it. I tried to lure its business users to get a free service off me, in the hope that they would upgrade to premium services. And whilst waiting for that to happen I also threw in some affiliate links from Commission Junction, a network which was young and new, and which I thought was a long shot which could get some extra cash.

5 years later the website had sold approximately half a million dollars worth of goods, as charted by that affiliate network and 3 or 4 other major networks through which I sold all those goods. Not a single company paid me through the original system I had planned, instead I was paid entirely by companies, largely mainstream corporate giants, paying me via the affiliate networks for that half million dollars of sales.

During that time my sales amount to a tiny tiny droplet in the ocean of how many sales were made online and are still happening now. Affiliate marketing basically has got itself rooted in a HUGE amount of money and the networks running it are rich and powerful now. Google's revenue systems complement affiliate marketing and are like a final side in a pyramid made up of these 'egalitarian' money-making systems which, strangely, undermine traditional "bullying" advertising which still exist out here as popups and spam but which essentially all get eradicated by ever more sophisticated blocking systems.

During those years the number of companies worldwide using the system rose from probably a few thousand to no more than a few 10s of 1000s, but the market share of those companies has grown such that the online sector is rapidly looking to consume, almost biblically, more than half the world's retail trade. Keyboard-fearers beware!

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