There are several compensation methods an affiliate marketing business can choose to employ. Currently, the cost per share (CPS) or revenue sharing method is being used by about 80 percent of affiliate marketing businesses. Next to CPS, the cost per action scheme is most popular with 19% of affiliating entities using it. The rest utilize other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).
Diminished Compensation Methods
Though less than one percent of the affiliate marketing industry implements cost per click, it is the most commonly used approach in the sectors of paid search and display advertising.
Cost per mille is considered the easiest and most profitable of the cost per click techniques because a visitor who visits an advertising made available by a publisher in his website is enough to earn that publisher his commissions. Pay per click is the evolved form of cost per mille. In pay per click, one extra step is added to the cost per mille system. That extra step is that visitors must first click the advertisements on a publishers site before he earns any commissions. Having people visit his site alone will earn him nothing.