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Apple Launches iTunes Affiliate Program
An anonymous user writes, "Apple has launched an affiliate program for their iTunes music store that earns participants 5% commission. Affiliates can link directly to songs, albums, and artists, as well as apply to the Apple Store affiliate program to sell hardware. It costs nothing to join and people that sign up prior to September 15 can win one of five free iPod minis. Apple has also assembled a handy FAQ."
Note that they don't pay you until you've accumulated $25 in commission, meaning you don't get anything until there are 506 purchases made.
" This is basically a 5% discount on all iTunes music?"
Well, if you purchased the music for yourself and you bought over a thousand songs each month then I guess it would be, yes.
FIn most cases though, I expect it would represent a 5% kickback to any site owner who could generate 1000 clickthrus that culminate in a purchase, which is quite a bit different.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
No, It means that you, the re-seller, gets a five percent cut out of every song you sell.
In other words, Apple is allowing webmasters to have links on their websites that when a visitor clicks on it, iTunes will open up to the album page ready for the visitor to buy it.
Say for example,
"Hey peeps, I was listening to this one album the other day, and it was really nice. if you want to buy it so you can share my amazement, click here"
All an affiliate would be doing would be reffering more would-be customers to the iTMS.
Using FF .9.3 and will not register, did it with IE, sorry all.
You put a banner on your site, pointing to the iTMS. When someone clicks it and then buys something within the next 24 hours, you get a percentage of the transaction.
This has been working for a long time with the Apple Store, the fact that it now works with the iTMS too is the news bit.
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The form action itself is on an https connection. It's encrypted. Stop worrying.
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No, that is incorrect.
The $ DO accumulate over the months. Check the FAQ. It was linked from the original article.
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That's not how it works my friend.
Your data was secure, let me explain.
Your browser downloaded the website with the form on it over a clear channel, and displayed it in your browser. So far no problem.
Then you entered your personal data into the form on the website, which so far only exists in your computer's memory, none of that data was ever sent over the network until you pressed submit.
Once you pressed submit, your browser opened a secure connection to the url you posted and sent the data from the form to it. Never in this transaction was your data sent over the network in the clear.
Granted this is still a confusing move on Apple's part. The convention is usually to encrypt both the url with the form AND the url it is being submitted to. The first step is totally unnecessary from a security perspective, but it reassures people who think it is only safe to enter data if they see "https" on the form url.