Linkshare

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LinkShare Corporation

Type	Private
Founded	New York, New York (1996)
Headquarters	New York, New York
Key people	John Kim, Chairman Stephen Denton, President Abe Hsuan, General Counsel Jonathan Levine, CTO
Industry	Affiliate marketing
Products	Affiliate network
Website	LinkShare.com

LinkShare Corporation is a provider of technology solutions to track, manage, and analyze the performance of sales, marketing, and business development initiatives.

Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet ^[1].

LinkShare clients are Fortune 500 and prominent companies doing business online, and include J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express, Avon Products and Dell.

1 History
2 Ownership
3 Services
4 Dynamic Rich Media
5 Company Website
6 References
7 Major Competitors
8 See also

[edit] History

The LinkShare Corporation (LinkShare) was founded in 1996 by Stephen Messer and Heidi Messer and is headquartered in New York City, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and London UK.

[edit] Ownership

LinkShare Corporation is the wholly owned U.S. division of Rakuten, Inc., the number one portal in Japan for shopping^[2], online finance and travel, and the seventh largest Internet company in the world. Rakuten is a public company (JASDAQ: 4755).

[edit] Services

LinkShare offers a number of services to online merchants. The primary services are:

LinkShare Affiliate Marketing Network - Affiliate Program Management and Tracking platform which uses Linkshare's patented non cookie-based tracking technology
LinkShare Search Advantage, which includes Paid Placement, Paid Inclusion and Search Affiliate Management Services
LinkShare MediaTracker, which provides tracking and reporting beyond affiliate marketing, including email campaigns and display advertising campaigns

[edit] Dynamic Rich Media

Dynamic Rich Media or short DRM is a term used by Linkshare to describe one of their Ad Formats, which is in essential nothing else but a rich media Ad such as Flash). It has the feature that any changes made to the Ad by the advertiser via the Linkshare interface will automatically change the Ad on all publisher web sites as well, without the need for the publisher (Affiliate) to change anything on their end.