Tips: What’s Behind Linkshare’s Acquisition of Traffic Strategies?
Sam HarrelsonAffiliate Programs, News and Updates, Tips June 5th, 2007
Last night into early this morning, news broke that the affiliate network Linkshare had made its first acquisition, Traffic Strategies.
Traffic Strategies is a lead generation and validation firm out of Tampa, Florida. The acquisition by Linkshare gives even more emphasis to the lead generation sector of online performance marketing, which has been heating up to a slow boil since late 2005.
It’s no secret that lead generation is one of the hot spots of online marketing, and will only increase in importance and profitability as marketers become more savvy in their abilities to court qualified online users.
Steve Denton, President of Linkshare, writes…
The acquisition of Traffic Strategies.com is a continuation of LinkShare’s strategy to provide our partners with the best pay-per-action products and services. Traffic Strategies.com will bring expertise and new features to our LinkShare Lead Advantage offering here in the US, and around the world. What’s more, I hope it demonstrates to you, our partners, the continued commitment of our parent company, Rakuten.
For our merchants who rely on LinkShare for customer acquisition, Traffic Strategies.com adds strong capabilities to our Lead Advantage Service. For our affiliates, as we accelerate the growth of Lead Advantage, you will have access to new and varied offers.
(Oddly enough, the entire press release and message from Denton only linked the last word “strategies.com” instead of the whole term “trafficstrategies.com,” but that’s beside the point).
There were no terms disclosed in the announcement, but I have an email in to Linkshare PR to try and find out some of the financial details.
So, with acquisition Silly Season 2007 fully upon us, will lead generation firms such as LeadPoint start to be gobbled up by middle tier advertising agencies to round out their stable so that they can, in turn, be gobbled up by a Yahoo or Google?
Is this a signal that super affiliates like Traffic Strategies are the next target for acquisitions?
June 5th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Traffic Strategies is much more than just lead gen although if I had to guess this is their bread and butter. Traffic Strategies also deals heavily in “highly creative” retail affiliate tactics — domain re-directing on typos, sneaky brand bidding in PPC search, etc.
Linkshare is acquiring distribution. This is to be expected of affiliate networks. There’s nothing else for them to do at this point in order to attempt (I say attempt as I don’t believe, unless the deal terms are right, that this can be a win for Linkshare).
The need to acquire the value in order to survive and the value is the distribution. They have literally been out-gunned by their own affiliates who have, for some time now, been tasting the fruits. Denton’s hand is being forced. He needs to grow the company and I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Look for more of this kind of thing.
June 5th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Sorry… I never finished. There’s nothing else for them to do at this point in order to attempt to remove the fat — take back the profit that these “Super Affiliates Gone Agency” have taken from them. Advertisers are wising up and expect affiliate networks to trim the fat on the transactions/leads they’re paying for.