© With many affiliate marketing programs canceled due to the pandemic, residential IP providers like IPRoyal invite individuals to become affiliates in their internet connection sharing businesses.
May 18, 2021. The pandemic’s effects on affiliate marketing programs for essential versus non-essential goods have varied massively. While affiliate offers for gyms and some education courses have been substantially lowered or canceled, the pandemic was favorable for affiliate programs for health supplements, medical supplies, and other essential goods and services.
Internet bandwidth is another essential good that has experienced a significant upsurge in demand since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the past year has been a time of growth for many residential IP providers—companies that offer people a way to exchange their unused bandwidth for monetary rewards.
While residential IP users are compensated merely for renting out their unused bandwidth, companies like IPRoyal have introduced affiliate programs that offer users a way to boost their earnings. Here, users are rewarded a commission rate from the shared bandwidth of every new user that has joined the IPRoyal Pawns platform via their affiliate link.
“While sharing internet bandwidth may be a way for people to earn enough to cover their data plans, our affiliate program offers a way to generate a more substantial income. Given that the average earnings on our platform are in the $5–20 range, a person who invites 100 new users, can generate up to $2000 a month,” said Karolis Toleikis, CEO at IPRoyal. “We see this initiative as a way to outsource part of our marketing efforts and we treat the users who participate in the affiliate program as our partners.”
In addition to offering a way to generate passive income through participation in their affiliate program, some residential IP providers extend companies and individuals an opportunity to become large-scale distributors of their residential IPs.
“Aside from working with our end-users directly, we also work on a B2B basis, supplying other residential proxy providers with residential IPs. We also provide users with a special residential IP reselling API that they can easily integrate into their website. We handle all of their proxy-related administrative duties and maintain the servers in check. This way the companies can focus on identifying prospective user segments, branding, and other day-to-day activities of running a business,” explained Mr. Toleikis.
While entering this form of partnership usually requires undertaking more robust investments in marketing and business development, the potential pay-offs are much greater too. In part, this is due to the substantial discounts that are applied to wholesale purchases of residential IPs.
“Reselling residential IPs is particularly profitable if companies decide to purchase proxies at higher quantities. As far as regular proxy pricing goes, we usually charge $2/GB, however, for those purchasing over 5000GB, the price goes down to $0.80. Therefore, companies that resell proxies at our regular price make $1.20 for every GB sold, which is a decent profit margin,” said Mr. Toleikis.
As countries begin to ease lockdown restrictions and industry sectors recover, the lasting effects of the pandemic will become clearer. While the current circumstances have been harsh on some affiliate marketing segments, the time of the pandemic has also created new employment opportunities.
