TopRanked.io Weekly Affiliate Digest: What’s Hot in Affiliate Marketing [Parimatch Affiliate Program]

This week, I noticed something odd.

We take a lot of interest in sports here. But so far, we haven’t talked about the biggest sporting event this year.

The 2024 Paris Olympics.

Now, we’ll cover it a little more in an upcoming edition of our affiliate news digest.

But, for now, there are two things you need to know.

The first, is how to say Paris.

The second, is how to make money from people wanting to bet on the Olympics.

TopRanked.io Affiliate Partner Program of the Week — Parimatch Affiliate Program

Lucky for you, pronouncing Paris properly and monetizing the Olympics are the same thing.

To pronounce it, you say Pari, as in Paris without the final s. And to monetize it, you say Pari, as in the Parimatch affiliate program.

Let’s take a closer look at the latter.

Parimatch Affiliate Program — An OG in Online Sportsbooks

There’s a pretty good chance that you already know about the sportsbook behind the Parimatch Affiliate Program.

There are two good reasons why.

The first is that Parimatch has done a pretty good job of building a strong reputation over the years. And that’s great when it comes to conversions.

The second reason is that Parimatch has been around on the interwebz for almost three decades.

Again, that’s great for conversions — nothing says trustworthy like a brand that can go the distance.

And as for the actual sportsbook, yeah, pretty much every base is covered (excuse the sports pun). And that means, later on this year, they’ll have full Olympics coverage, which is great if you’re gonna try and monetize the event.

Parimatch Affiliate Program — The Commissions

Like all the best things in life, the Parimatch Affiliate Program keeps its commission plans simple. Basically, you’ll be getting a 30% rev share deal with the Parimatch affiliate program right from the get go.

As for payments, that’s also relatively simple. You just log into your Parimatch affiliate program account when you’re ready to get paid. Then you generate an invoice. And, if you get it in before the 15th of the month, you’ll get paid that month.

But if you miss the deadline, no sweat. The Parimatch affiliate program will still pay you. You’ll just have to wait another month. No biggie.

Parimatch Affiliate Program — Next Steps

Alright, before reading on, you’re probably going to want to sign up for the Parimatch affiliate program.

If you’re still not convinced, then go take a look at our full Parimatch affiliate program review over on TopRanked.io.

Or, if you don’t wanna waste any more time, head here to sign up with the Parimatch affiliate program.

Affiliate News Takeaways — The Revenge of the Home Page

This week, The New Yorker published this article. It’s titled “The Revenge of the Home Page”.

The basic gist is that there’s a new emerging online trend. To explain that trend, here’s a quick copy-paste that more or less sums it up:

“Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site.”

In other words, the so-called ‘revenge’ here is more of a ‘resurgence’ of the home page. But, hey, the word ‘resurgence’ doesn’t quite have that same “click me” vibe, does it?

Anyway, long story short, a bunch of companies have been reinvesting in their home pages. And, apparently, people are actually using them.

Better yet, there’s also been a pretty big reversal from the last 10+ years where we’ve consumed everything via social media algorithms and Google searches. Instead, people are actually typing domain names into their browsers and navigating there directly.

Cool right? Time to fire up that GoDaddy auctions subscription and bring back cyber squatting liek it;d 1999, right?

Well, sure. Maybe.

Only problem is, domains ain’t so cheap no more. At least, they’re not if someone’s already bought them.

And good luck finding unclaimed near-misses on any popular website.

But there is an opportunity here.

The trick is to spot what’s driving people to go to the effort of typing out a real domain name instead of just Googling and/or passively scrolling through everything.

And here, there are two parts.

Part 1: Aggregation

The first part that’s driving a resurgence in home pages is that websites who are benefiting from this resurgence actually have a homepage worth going to.

For some, this has meant business as usual, like Arts & Letters Daily.

But for most, this means a whole home page redesign.

The Verge is the poster child here. Once upon a time, their home page resembled any other news publication. Today, their home page resembles the sort of bastard offspring you’d expect if a news site and a social media feed had a child.

What’s curious here is if you take a look at some of these sites, a common theme seems to emerge.

That theme is aggregation.

Arts & Letters, for its part, is simple enough, It’s just three links per day to articles related to literature.

The Verge, with its bastard child of a home page, also does something similar. Only, it posts a feed of news stories, both in-house, and from other publishers.

Yes. That means it’s linking directly to other sites directly from its home page.

Crazy, right?

Suicidal, even!

But, apparently, it’s working. The Verge says its “Loyal reader” numbers are up by a whopping 47%.

That’s a pretty big boost for what essentially amounts to a home page redesign and a bunch of re-posted content.

So it would seem that one secret formula for boosting direct traffic to your home page is to become an aggregator of stuff.

But before you just dive in willy-nilly and start aggregating the internet, there’s still another part to this story.

Part 2: Enshittification

Enshittification is something we’ve written about before in our Alpha Affiliates review edition.

To help catch you up if you missed it, it’s basically the process by which big internet platforms degrade over time. 

Or, to put a visual spin on it, it’s the process that took Facebook from this:

To now being awash in this:

Now, to be clear, the process of enshittification has nothing to do with “spammers”, or even “bots talking to bots”, as is becoming increasingly common on Facebook.

It’s 100% a choice platforms make to boost certain types of content as they look to milk more and more revenue.

In the early days, improving product was the way to go. Good product equals more people using your thing more often. And that equals more money.

But the world population is a finite thing. So you eventually hit a point of deceleration.

In Google’s case, that would have been around 2019. That’s when it called a “code yellow” (Google speak for what the rest of us call a “code red”) due to weakness in search query growth.

The solution was to boost queries “in user negative ways (turn off spell correction, turn off

ranking improvements, place refinements all over the page).”

In other words, if you reduce the quality of search, users will just search more. And thus you have the decline in Google search result quality most of us have felt, but not had officially confirmed until now.

But Google’s not alone here.

Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, you name it. Anywhere you look, the trend towards “growth hacking” has slowly been eating away at the user experience.

After all, why boost content that just drives users off-site when you can keep them on-site? And while you’re at it, why not just go all in on clickbaity engagement farming to really boost the numbers?

The only problem here is that there’s a tipping point. At some point, all that “growth hacking” just turns users off.

And thus some of them just go back to the dark ages of the internet — getting their content by typing URLs into their browser.

Part 3: Making Sense of it All

Now, don’t get me wrong here. The sudden resurgence in home pages doesn’t mean that’s the future of the internet.

Nor does a steady decline in the quality of search and social doesn’t mean the death of platforms.

At some point, the line will stop going up with each new “growth hack”. Eventually, user attrition will halt any increase in time on-site from users who stick around. It may even go down as user growth stalls. And if this happens, I suspect platforms will focus on improved user experience again.

But, until then, don’t be surprised if direct traffic to websites keeps increasing in the interim.

Of course, this doesn’t mean every website should expect a boost in people coming straight to their home page. Nothing’s ever that simple.

As we’ve already touched on, aggregation seems to be a common theme among websites that are seeing a boost.

But, I suspect there’s a bit more to this than just looking for a simple aggregator. After all, social media already does this.

Here, I think an observation by trend forecaster/consultant Sean Monahan could be useful.

In a report he put out last year, he talks about the decline in cultural institutions. Or what he calls “the shift away from gatekeeping and toward democratization”. This has been bad news for legacy brands like Vogue, Random House, MTV, MoMA, The New York Times, etc.

Here he observes that “The free-wheeling early days of social media seduced creative scenes into believing a new decentralized paradigm had been achieved. Who needs stuffy zombie institutions when we have Instagram?”

Now, as a “trend consultant”, Monahan is clearly more concerned with “culture” than “content in general”. But the observation could just as easily apply to anything. For example, replace “culture” with “sport”, and the same can now be said for ESPN, Sports Illustrated, or any number of other sports media outlets.

Who needs these stuffy institutions when you can just log onto X/Facebook/Instagram and follow athletes directly, get live game updates, and more?

But there is a problem.

According to Monahan, “The problem with non-hierarchical models is human beings are not non-hierarchical creatures.”

Now, this observation in and of itself isn’t the death blow to giant platforms. After all, we’ve all flocked to them — and stuck with them — for multiple decades now.

But problems arise when, for example, Google’s mission pivots its mission from being to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, and instead shifts to boosting total queries via  “user negative” tactics to ‘trap them in an endless loop of useless search results’.

The same applies to social algorithms that have gradually shifted away from giving you a nicely organized stream of content from friends/family and other accounts/pages you follow. Now, you’re more likely to get trapped in an infinite doom scroll of engagement bait and other useless snippets that leave you more disoriented than informed.

And so maybe, part of what explains the sudden interest in home pages is strongly tied to people looking for order and hierarchy again.

That might at least explain why The Verge has seen such a massive bump in loyal users, even as it actively drives people off-site from its own home page.

It organizes. It curates. It brings hierarchy.

Part 4: How to Take Advantage of This

Alright, so you’re sold on the potential of home pages. Maybe you’re even sold on the whole aggregation thing.

But before you go “all in” on this, there are a couple of things you’re going to need.

First, you’re going to need a memorable, easy-to-type domain name.So no best-sports-betting-website-predictions-and-tips.com or anything like that.

You’re gonna need something short and to the point.

Like CXSports.io, for example.

That’s a good domain name. (And a good website.)

Second, you’re going to need an idea that’s good enough that people will want to come back for more.

And third, your homepage is gonna need to bring order to people’s lives.

Now, you could do like The Verge did and invent some bastard child hybrid of a social feed/news website that links out to a blend of in-house and third-party content.

But, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

You could also do something like this sports odds and predictions site did. Provide a clean, well-organized and up-to-date feed of content (in this case, predictions for upcoming sports games) that’s easy to make sense of.

Basically, all you need to do is provide value that’s worth coming back for, and do it from a domain that’s easy to come back to.

Oh, and you’re also gonna need to build your brand somehow.

But, for that, there are a thousand and one guides on how to start getting traffic to your website.

Takeaway

Look, there’s more to this than just slapping together a home page and calling it done.

You’re gonna have to make it useful. And you’re gonna have to make it memorable.

But that doesn’t mean this needs to be hard or expensive.

To give an example, there are a bunch of memorable domain names that are freely available right now. I just did a quick search using an expired domain service, and found sportsxt.com available for registration.

That took me 30 seconds.

And no, it’s not “up for sale”. Nor is it up for auction. It’s 100% totally unregistered, meaning you can take it right now for a few bucks if you want.

Now, as for making it useful, there are a million ideas here.

But AI could be your friend.

One of the other big winners from the home page revival article — Semafor — apparently “uses A.I. translation to help Semafor journalists search for and summarize articles from international publications.”

So why not buy that domain name I just handed you, and spin up some AI to “search for and summarize articles from international publications” about sports?

Make it useful. Make it memorable.

And don’t spam it with too many ads. (Take a look at how this free betting tips website does it.)

And then once you’re done, monetize it with the Parimatch affiliate program.

Closing Thought

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys consuming personal growth content, then there’s a common theme you probably know and (possibly) love.

Positivity.

Word on the street is, if you wanna live a good life, there ain’t no room for cynicism, negativity, being a hater, or any of that stuff.

And if you buy into that, then I got four words for you.

Stop being so negative.

You see, like anything, there’s a way to see the positive and the negative.

And there’s certainly a positive side to staying cynical.

Being a hater is what allows you to look at something and say “that should be better”.

Being negative about something can generate the motivating force that drives you away from one thing and into another (hopefully better) thing.

And being a cynic may just prevent you from falling into the trap of mediocrity where you delude yourself into thinking everything’s great when really, it should be better.

In other words, taking a negative view of things from time to time can be the biggest act of optimism you can possibly commit.

It’s a lens you can look through when you’re looking for an even better and brighter future.

So here’s an idea.

Go put on your most cynical hater hat.

Now go look at what every other sports website is doing.

They suck, right?

Now write out the five biggest ways they suck.

And then make a website that doesn’t do any of those things.

And once you’re done, monetize it hard. The Parimatch affiliate program will help.

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(Featured image by SevenStorm via Pexels)

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