It is a rare day when you should take note of the launch of a new affiliate network. Today is one of those days.

pepperjamNETWORK Launches today

Kris Jones and his team at Pepperjam today launched the aptly named pepperjamNETWORK.

What does it mean to you?

What makes this different from the 100 or so other networks that sell out Affiliate Summit's exhibit hall, you ask? It is consistency and history.

Most of the dozens of affiliate networks that have been born in this decade sprang forth from super affiliates who negotiated above market commissions and shared those higher rates with others as a way to keep volume up (making money is the obvious goal of a for-profit so we can leave that out). They all seem to have the same merchants with similar deals that they pass around. But these great deals are short-term. They are here today but often may be gone this afternoon... without warning.

That's not Pepperjam. Pepperjam began as a merchant, then became an affiliate and then became an agency. According to Kris Jones, before the launch of PJN, Pepperjam's business was 5% affiliate (Shogging.com) and 95% agency.

There is a big difference converting affiliate deals to an affiliate network and migrating agency relationships to a network. I think we are about to witness why the latter works better.

Pepperjam manages affiliate programs mostly using CJ. PJN is built off of these merchants to start. They have either migrated to PJN or are running on both networks. That gave Pepperjam a great group to test with.

The sales team at PJN did a great job and has added a group of merchants that are exclusive to Pepperjam. I'm happy to see Judith Leiber, Ben Sherman and Jelly Belly on board and there are many more that are part of the network or coming online in the next few months. (Of course, I was tempted not to write anything to keep it a secret but I'm sure others will let the cat out of the bag.) The good news is that these merchants will be there tomorrow, next week and I think next year.

PJN Test Drive

Kris called me the day the beta went live. We've been playing around with it for a few months now and PJN is for real. It has the tracking we need although it seems to drop SIDs a little more often than other networks. There are a variety of reports and I'm sure more to come... just like the other major networks. This is where being an affiliate (and a search affiliate at that) helps Pepperjam. The Pepperjam team knows what publishers need and have built it into the system.

Product datafeeds went live yesterday and I haven't had time to have my dev team implement them so I can't comment on PJN's datafeeds. I'm guessing they are what we need.

Last Friday I played around with the system and e-mailed in a question about a merchant. A few minutes later a window popped up with a PJN team member contacting me with the info I requested. It is basically an in-house IM window powered by Userplane. As an IM junky, I'm OK with that. Some people may not like it but they'll have to see what preferences can be set. I'm happy to have the instant contact.

Transparency

That's a big place where Pepperjam has been looking to make change: Transparency. Kris set a goal for PJN to facilitate communication between publishers and the folks we need to speak with, both at the network and merchants. That information isn't always available with other networks. We'll see how this plays out especially as the number of merchants grows.

The good news for PJN is that my biggest complaint is that I hate the black background. I like black T-shirts but find the black background to be bad Web design. Yeah, I'm Old School. Blame Alan Kay. Also the programmers set the default to 10 for most screens with no way to change the default globally or even when returning to the page. Of course, all of the other networks do it that way (numbers vary) so I can't hold it against PJN. But it still bugs me. All of the standard image sizes seem to be there for every merchant and easy to find. Plus, they are mostly static as none of the merchants run casinos.

Conflict of Interest?

Of course we're going to hear the usual chorus of "conflict of interest". Yes, Pepperjam is a publisher, agency and network. If you are in the US and don't like it, work exclusively with ShareASale which is the only standalone network. Otherwise, you can work with Google, Valueclick, Rakuten, Pepperjam or any super-affiliate that became a network.

I've heard a lot of stories about Pepperjam over the years. I've always found the Pepperjam team to be upfront and to deliver on what they've promised. (I only know one person who has a legitimate gripe with Pepperjam.) The client list is a resounding statement about the quality of the team. Plus, from what I hear Pepperjam has helped revitalize the small Pennsylvania town it is in and has given 20 and 30-somethings a reason to stay and somewhere fun and interesting to work.

A New Middleweight Contender

So you can call me a fan of PJN. I think it will be a contender (and if it will bulk up to heavyweight). Time will tell if PJN will take a bite out of CJ, Linkshare and Performics. It definitely gives companies who don't want to work with the big 3 a choice other than ShareASale. (I still am amazed at how much Brian Littleton and his small team have done to build SAS. Pepperjam is over 100 people. SAS is a fraction of that. Yeah, I'm a fan of the SAS team as well.)

I'm looking forward to watching what Kris and his team do to grow PJN and what merchants they will add. Oh, and if you wonder where the name came from, I started to interview Kris but neither of us had time last week to do it justice. We got far enough for me to find out where the name came from:

I founded "Pepperjam" with my brother (Rick) as a gourmet food biz back in 1999. We developed a line of gourmet food products based upon a recipe our Grandma Jones made for us when we were kids. We put her face on the label and we even had a chef write a cookbook (with her face on the cover) using her products. My Grandmother originally called the product "Mississippi Mud" and never made reference to "Pepperjam." However, my brother and I decided to rename the product line "Grandma Jones' Pepper Jam" because we thought the name had more marketing appeal than "mud." Anyway, we forged forward with the gourmet food business. My primary role in the company was marketing so I developed a strategy to build the brand and market the product line over the internet. We created a Web site at www.pepperjam.com and started interviewing Celebrity Chefs and gourmet food experts since I thought that would drive traffic to the site and allow us to cross market the product. Long story short...the celebrity chef interviews worked and we started driving massive amounts of traffic to the Web site through successful SEO. I also learned that I could buy traffic through PPC engines like GoTo.com so I used that to supplement traffic. Before long I realized that we could monetize the Web traffic beyond just selling "Pepper Jam - the gourmet food." For instance, I started building out more and more pages on our Web site around promoting affiliate offers - I was using cross marketing with the existing site, pay-per-click, and SEO to arbitrage the offers. By 2002 I created one of the largest affiliate marketing businesses in the US. I left the gourmet food biz in early 2000 to pursue the affiliate marketing business exclusively, while also attending law school. At the same time I also started taking on clients as a consultant. While the affiliate revenue changed my life I saw an even bigger opportunity in creating an online marketing agency that offered management services in the key areas of search and affiliate marketing (and now online media buying and technology). That is what we've been pursuing here at Pepperjam over the last few years.

So go sign up for pepperjamNETWORK... you know you want to.