Yup -Good stuff - Had found this post from Brad Waller on geek talk
Thread
Here's the post/Thread from there - cuz I think the google link won't work:
I hope this does not get too long, as I've been doing stuff online for quite a while. Back in college, I remember getting an ARPANET account was a really big deal. I got access for some work back in 1985 or so and got to know email. My job out of school was in engineering, so I got email access in the late 80's or early 90's and got hooked on newsgroups and email lists. In fact, I'm still on one of those first email lists.
In 1993, my future partners showed me this cool thing called a Web browser and we all thought about what we could do with it. Our first idea was to collect ski maps from everywhere and have an online ski map site. The next idea that was actually partially developed in 1994 was online yellow pages. We were too early for this, as nobody understood why they would even want to pay money to get placed on a Web site. That, and adding in the content was very time consuming for us.
In October, 1994 we launched EPage Classifieds. This was a breakthrough because we made the site automated so that our users would provide the content. We originally charged for every ad, but that soon morphed into only charging for upsells and commercial ads. Back then, we only accepted checks in the mail, but we got started with online credit cards pretty quickly, and have had our Merchant account since 1997.
We knew that we could not expand on our own efforts, so we created a program in 1995 that allowed anyone to get a 20% discount if they placed enough ads. The idea was that these people could attract advertisers offline and place ads for them, and they could not only earn that 20%, but they could earn far more if they added on their own fees. Most advertisers would not know how much we charged as they did not have Internet access, but if they did, they would see our list price and not know that their agent was able to keep the 20% discout. This worked pretty well and we had about 80 active agents at the peak of the program. This was effectively an affliate program, although nobody had thought of that yet. The advantage here was that we did not have to write commission checks.
We also found that we got a lot of requests from niche sites for their own category. We had people asking for categories for RCA Video Disks, Corvettes, Baseball Cards & Collectibles, Ford Taurus SHO, etc. So, I had the idea that we provide these people with what they wanted. After all, if we did not, then they could just set up a simple page on their site and do it themselves. Why not effectively become our own competition? So in April of 1996 we started offering co-branded classifieds for other web sites. We now host over 28,000 such sites, and our very first site is still with us. While not the first affiliate program, this did launch before Amazon, and at this point could likely be the oldest affiliate program out there.
After a while, people seeing these co-branded sites wanted more. We had requests for fully custom sites with other's look/feel, categories, prices, etc. We modified our code for this, and in 1998 started offering custom sites such as the one we host for PieceUnique. Over the years, we found some resistance from clients worried about "the competition" hosting their classifieds, so we spun off this fully custom solution to AdConnect.com.
Finally, our last business actually started in 1999 or so. I had an idea for a better advertising solution. We had contracts with 24/7, DoubleClick, and other big firms, but I saw lots of inefficiencies and poor earnings compared to what I thought we could get. We came up with a very ambitious plan for a massive solution (these were the heady days of VC dollars falling from the sky) and set up a business plan and started shopping it around. About that time, the bottom fell out of the market and the idea was left sitting for a few years. Earlier this year, we revisited the idea to see if we could do a simpler version, more like phpAdsNew does but with integrated payments.
We still had contracts for advertising that did not pay all that well, and I spent way too much time dealing with potential advertisers and setting up campaigns to run from those few who had the budget to place an ad into our rotation. The smaller version was made to deal with these problems only, and leave off all the other cool ideas we had back in the beginning. We made a system that allows anyone to set up default ads (including AdSense, affiliate banners, etc.) for their site and then set a rate for advertisers to pay (per day or per view) if they wanted to get on that site. After six months or so of work, we got AdJungle off the ground in Beta ealier this year, and it is in full swing now. Now, advertisers can place campaigns for a few dollars on lost of sites, and it all happens without manual intervention.
We have ideas for five or six different things, and are trying to figure out what is next...
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Brad Waller | VP, Business and Affiliate Development
http://EPage.com - Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdConnect.com - Fully custom outsourced Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdJungle.com - Manage & sell your site's advertising - now with PPC text ads