Member sites receive ad credits

By Gerald Burstyn

      With the exception of Yahoo, portals have a difficult time distinguishing themselves from one another, and indeed there’s little that does distinguish them.
     Now Excite, ranked No. 8 in popularity, has come up with a scheme that promises to set it apart from all the other portals.
      If it sounds a little like franchising hamburgers stands, it is.
      Under an affiliate program launched this week, Excite is offering its content to other web sites at no cost. Sites that carry the branded Excite services, such as weather, stocks, sports and news, in turn stand to gain free advertising credits for users they drive to the Excite network.
      The way Excite figures, everyone wins. Participating web sites gain the content at no charge, along with the ad credits, and Excite stands to have the Excite logo plastered around the web, while gaining increased traffic to its site. Users at member sites clicking on content provided by Excite will be linked back to the Excite network.
       "If we get thousands of members, in essence they're expanding our reach by using our content,''  explains Chris Scott, products manager at Excite Affiliate Networks. Member sites will be able to redeem their credits for free advertising on the SmartAge network, a collection of 200,000 small-business web sites.
      "Creating valuable services like those available on excite.com is an enormous challenge for web sites looking to expand the content on their own site,'' says Joe Kraus, senior vice president and co-founder of Excite.   "The free advertising component of the affiliates network can help small and large sites alike grow their advertising budget without negatively impacting their bottom line.''
       Such deals are not new, notes Gene Slyman, director of media and marketing at Washington, DC-based Magnet Interactive. Amazon.com rewards publishers with a percentage of sales for each user who buys a book at its site. "Obviously, they're using this to drive traffic to their site,'' says Slyman of Excite. "It's not a bad idea,'' he adds, because it brings "more eyeballs to their content.''

-Gerald Burstyn is a staff writer for Media Life.