World Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 3. No. 2. March 2013 Issue. Pp. 103 – 113 Affiliate Marketing: The Case of Online Content Providers in Bangladesh Farooq Hossan* and Issa Ahammad** Field of Study: Marketing. Keywords: Affiliate Marketing, Content provider, Online Advertisement, Affiliate. 1. Introduction The internet existed since the end of 1960s that was the introduction of World Wide Web (WWW). It was a new medium for publishing information which started its rapid growth. Since then, the internet became the fastest spreading medium in human history. It took long 38 and 13 years for radio and television respectively to reach 50 million users. But the internet reached the same in just five years. In Bangladesh, internet becomes familiarized in 1990s. Since then its growth in every sector is boosted up. The power of WWW is in the ability to bring easy-to-use medium, which allows consumers find information using a network of websites. However, company’s website needs to attract internet users to visit the website. It did not take long since the World Wide Web was introduced before the companies realized the marketing possibilities of the internet. Many scholars note that, from the merchants’ point of view, the internet brings many opportunities and also threats. Companies can take advantage of new technologies and improve their competitiveness, but on the other hand, they also need to face new start- up companies, some of them with purely virtual operations. Affiliate marketing is a traffic * Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, Hamdard University Bangladesh, Bangladesh. ** Assistant Professor, Department of Business Administration, World University of Bangladesh, Bangladesh. Corresponding author’s e-mail: farooq.hossan@yahoo.com, Mobile: 01815189881. The purpose of this study is to explore the knowledge of affiliate marketing and investigate the views of content providers toward it in Bangladesh. Both primary and secondary data are used in this paper. This paper is exploratory in nature. Affiliate marketing is an agreement between a merchant and content providers to promote merchant’s products or services at their websites against payment. Here the task of content providers is not only to deliver the advertisement but also to persuade viewers to convert into customers. Findings from the study indicate that affiliate marketing is the most effective way to sell the advertising space to advertisers, incomparable to traditional media, easy and precise to measure of advertising responses, much more flexible, used to generate revenue and much easier to reach a variety of customers. One-to-one is the best affiliate program in our country. Several recommendations are explored in this paper for the development of affiliate marketing in Bangladesh and for further research. Rapid growth of online marketing indicates better possibilities of affiliate marketing that will contribute a lot in business sector.