The History of Affiliate Programs,

The question of where the first affiliate program was started is an interesting tale of deceit and murder, well maybe not the latter but you get my drift.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos claimed for many years that Amazon was the creator of the first Affiliate Program in 1996, but this is just a myth, yes they probably were the creators of the first large scale affiliate program, but there were many smaller, but workable affiliate schemes in place long before the Amazon program was around.
It’s interesting to note that in more recent years the claim to have “invented” the Affiliate Program has been changed to a more subtle “As one of the first online affiliate marketing programs”. At last they repented.

The fact is there were other affiliate style programs around before Amazons’ - Some as early as 1994, some say the first was CDNow, with PC Flowers and Gifts launching in the same year, quite a number of other programs appeared before the date of the Amazon launch, many within the adult side of the internet.

Nobody is really sure what was the first affiliate program around, as sites and businesses come and go, and so do people, information is lost, and we don’t know how we began. One thing is for sure though - It ain’t Amazon.

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