Making Money as a Web Host.

• Author: HOLTZMAN, HENRY
• Position: Review

Affiliated Selling: Building Revenue on the Web Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier John Wiley & Sons New York, NY; 2000 345 pages, $29.99

The Internet has begun to breathe new life back into the old concept of paying commissions for sales referrals. Back in the days before the World Wide Web--or even silicon chips--companies paid commissions to people who weren't considered part of their highly structured distribution network. The folks on the receiving end of this sales largesse were called "bird dogs" and the money was often called a "bird dog fee." Commercial and professional firms commonly "bird dogged" for one another until someone during the 1970s coined the term "networking" to replace it.

Networking may have been less colorful than bird dogging, but it was certainly far more apocryphal.

In 1996, the Internet retailer Amazon.com crossbred the concept of bird dogging with the even older technique of painting ads on the side of barns. The result was that anyone with a Web site could cut a deal with Amazom.com to feature a hot link from one site to Amazon's site. At the very least Amazon gained the highly valuable demographic information available from the prospective buyer's "cookie"--the information a Web site user automatically leaves behind when accessing a Web site. If a browsing visitor actually bought a book, CD or other product at Amazon, the company that owned the Web site providing the hot link received a commission on the sale.

Since 1996, companies and individuals with Web sites have begun to realize that they can make a lot more than a little money offering hot links or hypertext to sites owned by other companies or individuals. Merely showing that you had a reasonably high number of visits to your Web site could mean that your site was potentially worth serious money. For example, a site called Blue Mountain provided virtual greeting cards at no cost to sender or receiver. The number of contacts ("hits") each year by users was in the millions. In less than two years, the company that never made a dime by providing their imaginative greeting cards was sold for several billion dollars.

Experts considered the price to be fair.

All of which begs the question, what is affiliate selling? At its most basic, affiliate selling is simply high-tech bird-dogging. In theory, if you have a Web site and people visit it regularly, you can become an affiliate for a business that wants to attach a hot link to it. You don't even have to be...