How do content providers perceive advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing in comparison with other forms of online advertising?

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER # 1: INTRODUCTION1

Background of the Study1

Problem Statement2

Purpose of the Study3

Research Hypothesis3

Significance of the Study3

CHAPTER # 2: LITERATURE REVIEW5

Content Structuring5

Measuring the Perceived Content Provider Credibility6

Measuring Credibility of Content Provider7

Advertising Research8

Online Advertising9

CHAPTER # 3: METHODOLOGY13

Research Design13

Experimental Web-site13

Data analysis methods14

REFERENCES15

CHAPTER # 1: INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

"Information overload" is the term that in the context of the Internet refers to the overwhelming amount of information available to the Internet users. The growing threat of the information overload from the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) has been well documented in popular press as well as the academic research.

Hal Beghel summarized in the Communications of the ACM (1997) that "the mere fact that a resource is available on the Internet does not provide any guarantee of importance, accuracy, utility or value. Failure to understand this has led to the proliferation of millions of individual and organizational vanity home pages and document clusters. The most immediate cause of information overload on the Web is caused by the Web trying to till the dual role of being both a private and public information and communication medium" (Yang Oliver 2004 733).

According to Beghel and others previous researchers the early solution to the information overload problem, a search engine has largely been ineffective. Search engines not only have difficulties finding the relevant content but they also provide no means tor ascertaining such content properties as recency, accuracy and trustworthiness of that content (Perry Cynthia 1997 388).

The overabundance of information poses many costs in economic terms to the Web users who seek reliable, consistent, up-to-date and accurate information tor making various decisions like buying a product or making an investment. These costs include increased search costs which come from having to search a large number of sites for the needed information, and the monitoring costs which are incurred when a user has to monitor the sites for the updates.

Problem Statement

Understanding the proper placement of online advertising is imperative for advertisers and online media outlets, because poor advertisement placement may alter a user's response to the brand or service presented in the online advertisement (Ha 2008 30).

Online advertising is defined as the use of internet as a medium for marketing. Online advertising came into existence in 1994. Since then, it has experienced a tremendous growth in popularity. Many marketers find internet ads to be more measurable than ads on other media. Internet advertising industry has grown from $8.1 billion in 2000 to $22.7 billion in 2009 (Bredow 2010 69). Being a relatively new concept, the area is wide open for researchers to dig deeper into the various aspects of it including the pricing of online advertisements. Online advertisements are broadly classified into four major categories:

Search based advertising which appear on search results pages;

Display advertising which appear on non-search web pages;

Classifieds advertising which appear on web pages; and

Internet email based ...