The original concept of affiliates was first adopted by radio and television networks. They used to delegate some programs to local stations and the profit revenue was shared by the network and the station beaming the program. In online affiliate marketing, the radio or television program has been replaced by the affiliate program. It is actually a set of tasks like advertising and marketing, which is done by the web site owner.

Online affiliate networks play an important role. They act as the exchange medium between web site owners or publishers and the merchants or advertisers. The networks approach advertisers and publishers simultaneously. They get the requirements from the advertisers and correlate them with the publishers.

An online affiliate network generally has many advertisers and publishers as clients. The advertisers are exposed to hundreds of the publishers and their resources and the publishers to hundreds of merchants who would be giving them work. In a good number of cases a merchant chooses many affiliates and so does the affiliate. Since, this requires a lot of administrative work, the services of affiliate networks become indispensable.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best means of marketing the products on the web. It is cheap and reliable. The advertiser spends money that comes as his profit. There is no wastage of the resources, no hassles and wastage of time. The advertiser has to make creative and hand them over to the affiliate network.

Affiliate network forwards the requirements to the publisher. The publisher approves the offer and places the content on his web site. The process of taking the content and creative from the advertiser and forward it to the publisher may be automated. The ad serving programs do this job. The publisher specifies the space on the web site, approves the program and the content gets automatically placed on the site.

Further, the publisher is provided with a tracking code that monitors the actions on the forwarded content. All clicks and actions are recorded and forwarded to the advertiser. Meanwhile, the affiliate network calculates the earnings and the payments due of the advertiser. Online affiliate networks have a number of jobs to do. If they take an overriding charge, it is worth the service.