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Admitad drove sales worth $65 million through affiliate marketing in India in 2019, reveals Admitad Annual Affiliate Report 2020
MUMBAI: Global affiliate network Admitad released its annual Affiliate Report 2020 which studies trends in the international affiliate marketing industry, identifying the global market growth drivers over the past year. The report provides an in-depth understanding of the region-wise shift to the emerging trends, where e-commerce has emerged as the most common vertical followed by the banking sector.
Coming to affiliate market trends in India, which is one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world and especially in the APAC region, the report marks the industry as decentralized in the country. The affiliate sector in India has shown a growth of 69.7% with the largest share of sales of 56% from the category of household appliances and electronics and 20.1% from the Online Supermarkets. Goods from China constitute 4.2% of the share of the total sales. Out of the total sales figure for $64.8m, the electronics segment leads with the total mobile sales of 28.5%. With traffic almost equally divided between desktop and mobile, it is expected that the mobile category shall play an even bigger role in the coming years since affiliate marketing is no longer restricted to desktop traffic. The report provides a remarkable insight for the advertisers on the need for in-app tracking features to make the most of the growing mobile trend. In-app tracking on mobiles shall cater to promising categories like blogs, finance comparison sites, cashback services, contextual advertising and loyalty programmes.
The segments that are garnering a lot of attention and funding from investors in India are Online Grocery, Gaming (Fantasy Cricket in particular) and Online Food Delivery. It is also found that affiliate programmes in the financial segment are turning more towards CPA than CPL models. Education is one of the top categories which shifted to CPA advertising. Travel remained one of the biggest categories within affiliate marketing and touched the revenue of $48 Million. The report also mentions that in 2019, the fashion industry alone made $12.5 bn—over a third of the country’s B2C sales.
The report marks the growth of Blogs and Contextual Advertising, a new trend contributing to 9% of the share of the total sales. It is revealed that many of the major brands have increased their spending on bloggers and there is a rise in influencer marketing. The new trend also indicates a rise in alternative sources like reward sites and influencers. The top sales contributors are found to be Cashback and Coupons, constituting 46% of the share.
Speaking about the findings from the report, Neha Kulwal, Country Manager, Admitad India, remarked, “We have been expecting more and more companies to move towards the CPA model in the Indian sector and 2020 the report reflects this trend to be growing. Admitad has recruited more influencers for the CPA-based cooperation and the current trends to show that the telegram platform is going to emerge as one of the strong contenders in India in the coming years, following the global trends in the subscription campaigns.”
Admitad, as an organization, promotes transparency and one of the most significant takeaways from the report for the company and for the affiliate marketing industry is the increased trust among the Indian advertisers in affiliate networking.
Covering regions from the Asia Pacific, Europe, and MENA, the Admitad Affiliate Report 2020 covers data on more than 178 million orders and target actions completed via the Admitad platform in the world on all market segments from online to financial services.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
