Program Management Outsourcing

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintenance and work. The number of affiliate programs just increased in the last few years . To create an successful affiliate program gets harder compared to a few years ago. The days when programs were generating considerable revenue for the merchant even if they were poorly or not at all managed ("auto-drive") is gone.

Those not managed affiliate programs were one of the reasons why some of the negative examples of affiliates were in the position to do what they have done (spamming, trademark infringement, false advertising, "cookie cutting", typosquatting etc.).

The uncountable number of internet businesses in combination with the increased number of people who trust the current technology and do their shopping and business online caused and still causes a straight mature of affiliate marketing. The opportunities to generate a high amount of profit in combination with a much more crowded marketplace filled with about equal quality and sized competitors has two sites. On the one hand it made it harder for merchants to get noticed, but the other hand the rewards if you get noticed were raising.

Internet advertising industry was getting more and more professional and online media is in some areas closing the gap to offline media, where advertising is absolute professional and very competitive for many years already. The requirements to be successful are much higher than they have ever been. Those requirements are becoming often too much of a burden for the merchant to do it successfully in-house. Every day there are more merchants who are looking for alternative options. They find these options in relatively new outsourced (affiliate) program management or OPM companies. Those companies were often founded by veteran affiliate managers and network program managers.

The OPM are doing this highly specialized and difficult job of affiliate program management for the merchant. The OPM is some kind of a service agency that could be compared to Ad agencies that are doing the job to promote a brand or product in the offline world today.