Since the dawn of affiliate marketing, webmasters have been given a choice: PPC, PPS, Rev. Share (and even PPI¹). Now we webmasters (adult site or No) are looking for the gold pick, based on stats or mother’s trial and error. Here are the cold, hard stats, so you don’t have to go through trial and error.

First, a quick review of each type of affiliate service:

pay per click it’s a fixed rate (often ranging from $0.01 to $0.03) of money per click from each unique visitor.

pay per sale it is a fixed amount of money for each purchase made when a visitor buys from that affiliate. This price varies greatly by affiliate, however an example amount is $25.00.

revenue sharing it is a recurring amount of money for affiliates who offer memberships. When a visitor to your site starts this membership, he receives a monthly percentage of your payments until his membership ends. This price varies greatly by affiliate, however an example amount is $20.00.

An experiment was carried out with 1719 unique visitors taking into account each affiliate program. During a controlled time period, PPC raised $51.57, PPS raised $75.00, and REVS raised a whopping $269.55.

The golden choice? revenue sharing. This is because people who sign up for memberships stay for an average of 6 months, and with a recurring rate of money not far from a sale, you will consistently make more money than PPC and PPS.

¹PPI: pay per impression; this type of affiliate service was excluded from the article and experiment due to its unpopularity with modern affiliates.