What Defines a ‘Top Affiliate Network’?

Website Magazine just came out with a list of the top 50 affiliates networks. I gave the list a look over and was a little puzzled. First of all, they don’t base these rankings on any other data besides traffic. An affiliate network could be second to Google as far as traffic goes, but if they suck, there’s no way they should be considered for the top 50 list.

ClickBooth was ranked #1, which I don’t completely agree with. I don’t think an affiliate manager has contacted me since I was accepted into the network several months ago. In fact, when I log into my account, the spot where my affiliate manager’s contact information should be is completely blank.

The list also fails to list two major players in the affiliate networking community, Amped Media and Neverblue Ads are not represented at all. MarketLeverage also seems to be pretty low on the list — I thought for sure they would be in the top 10, but as I said, it’s based on traffic and nothing else.

Commission Junction is also pretty high up on the list, where they should probably be last. They have got to have the worse service out of any network I’ve ever belonged to. I first joined CJ back in 2003 and made a good chunk of change with them for the first year. One day I tried logging into my account and my credentials weren’t accepted. After many phone calls and e-mails, no one could tell me what had happened. The account wasn’t suspended, just my login information wasn’t working. To this day, I still cannot log in. The worst!

Traffic ranking doesn’t really define an affiliate network at all. I wrote a post on what to look for before joining an affiliate network. Website Magazine should have taken some of those qualities into consideration before compiling their list.

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