Commission Junction Leads Growth in Name Brand Online Advertising

Thursday June 6, 8:07 am Eastern Time
Press Release

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 6, 2002--Commission Junction (www.cj.com) announced it has achieved the position as the network of choice for name-brand online advertisers.

Over the last six months, Commission Junction has attracted significantly more name brand advertisers to its network than any other competitor. Recently joining the Commission Junction network are New Line Cinema, KBToys, MSN, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, The New York Times, and C2it by Citibank, in addition to many others. Concurrently, top publishing sites such as Hewlett Packard, Prodigy, and Earthlink have been attracted to Commission Junction.

Third Party Endorsements

The New York Times uses Commission Junction and leading performance marketing agency NETexponent to increase online subscriptions for the newspaper. "Protecting brand integrity online has become increasingly important to our clients. Commission Junction has been a valuable asset in strengthening our quality assurance safeguards for The New York Times, allowing us to focus on growing and optimizing results," said Peter Figueredo, CEO and co-founder of NETexponent.

As the world's largest interactive agency, Carat Interactive has been working with Commission Junction for more than a year and has introduced such name brands as Jenny Craig and Market Facts into the network. Tom Henell, Carat Interactive senior vice president remarked, "Our performance marketing programs with Commission Junction have exceeded our expectations. Working with a third-party provider with a large base of quality Web publishers enables us to quickly deliver large-scale campaigns and guarantee measurable results for our clients."

Prodigy, a top destination site that serves 3.5 million subscribers, joined Commission Junction in November 2001. Through relationships with Commission Junction advertisers, Prodigy saw its profits increase significantly during the first quarter of 2002. Elizabeth Pagel, E-commerce manager at Prodigy remarked, "Commission Junction's easy-to-use system and quality advertisers played a huge role in this improvement."

Quality Network Leads to Increased Market Share

Beginning mid-year 2001, Commission Junction launched an initiative to evolve its broad based affiliate marketing network to focus on premium pay-for-performance relationships. To support this effort, the company launched the Open Marketplace, which identifies and segments quality advertisers and publishers in the network, and publishes performance information to all of them. Also, prospective clients were required to meet prescribed criteria prior to acceptance into the network. The company continued to see increased market share as a higher proportion of brand name companies benefited from the network's offerings. Monitoring of customer growth in the performance-based segment showed that 60 percent of all advertisers who joined a pay-for-performance network from October 2001 through March 2002 were with Commission Junction. Of identified name brand advertisers in the group, over 40 percent were Commission Junction clients. This increase in market share reflects a sustainable growth trend over the six-month period.

"The current numbers validate our decision to focus on building a quality network. We are extremely gratified to see our marketing strategy come to fruition so quickly. We have seen consistent revenue growth at a time when some of our competitors are reporting declining numbers," said Jeff Pullen, president of Commission Junction. "We expect to be the premier network for transforming online advertising into sales for the advertisers and into revenue for our publishers. Well selected, high quality companies make this happen."

About Commission Junction

Commission Junction, the largest pay-for-performance advertising network, allows online advertisers to acquire more customers and online publishers to earn the most revenue from their audience. By publishing payment and conversion statistics on advertisers, publishers, and ads within its network, Commission Junction offers the first open marketplace for online advertising. Both advertisers and publishers can quickly gauge the quality and potential of each relationship, allowing them to maximize performance of their online advertising campaigns.

Commission Junction acts as a trusted third party managing the network, tracking and reporting on the ads in real time, and handling monthly commission payments to network members. The company serves billions of impressions monthly, ranking it among the largest ad networks in the world. Clients include leading online marketers eBay, Capital One, Global Sports, MSN® and USA TODAY. Commission Junction is headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., with offices in San Francisco, New York and London. For additional information, visit www.cj.com or call 800/761-1072.