Commission Junction is one of the 800 pound gorillas of Affiliate Marketing. CJ is part of the publicly held ValueClick, which earned $39 million last year on marketing programs, including affiliate programs, email marketing and software for advertising agencies.
CJ handles affiliate programs for a lot of the big names, including Home Depot, Yahoo and Citibank.
Can you make money with Commission Junction? Like most affiliate programs it depend on the theme or niche of your web site, and how well you match your content and the CJ programs.
Our spider ran through the site recently, and Ive made a list of the major categories and their average Earnings Per Click (EPC). You will recall that EPC is calculated by taking the total commission payout for the advertiser and dividing it by the number of clicks that advertiser gets, so EPC measures how profitable each click is for the publisher. We used 7 day EPC, which measures EPC across the last seven days.
The spider also only saves the top ten advertisers in each category/subcategory, and since some advertisers are in more than one category/subcategory it tends to skew the results a bit (higher). We came up...