Wikipedia says that affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It was invented in the early days of the adult pornography industry where adult sites would pay people to refer others to watch videos. It wasn't until 1994 when the first non-adult site (CDNow) developed a “BuyWeb” program, which was the first “click-through” affiliate marketing service.

With the advent of blogging, social media sites, and e-commerce, affiliate marketing has grown exponentially. According to research from 2006, affiliates worldwide earned a total of $6.5 billion in commissions from a variety of different types of sources (online gambling sites, online stores, and even educational sites). With the anonymity of the internet world, the idea of affiliate marketing is one that simply just makes sense and is going to continue growing for a long time.

With so many different types of websites and advertising going on, it's getting to the point where it's hard to even determine what is and what isn't affiliate marketing. Amazon.com bar far wasn't the first to offer an affiliate program, but in 2000, Amazon filed for a patent on the entire affiliate marketing process. A major impact in recent years has been web 2.0. New developments have made it harder for small websites to become known and to make money very efficiently through affiliate marketing.

Then again, web 2.0 has also been able to help many affiliate sites. One example of this was when a website started giving away free iPods after applying for one of the sites offerings and getting a set amount of their friends to do the same. People, not believing it to be true, started believing when people actually started received their iPods in the mail. What made it a success was the blogosphere. People were amazed that they were able to get an iPod for “free” and so they blogged about it and the internet buzzed with the new trend. It became so popular, even television news stations picked it up.

Now, there are so many fake affiliate sites, that it's hard to determine what's real and what isn't. But there are still some that are guaranteed to work. Advertising has turned into a complex system, and can sometimes be considered affiliate marketing. CPM, CPC, CPA, CPS. Whenever people browse the internet, they're in constant access to ads. This is now the major way a lot of sites make money. Businesses pay other websites based on their traffic and how many clicks their ads usually get. Google Adwords and Yahoo! Marketing are two major examples.

So all in all, affiliate marketing has many pros and cons. In future years, it will probably eventually become so obscure that no one will be able to tell what exactly is considered affiliate marketing anymore, but a new way of making money will always get old.