death of a platform
June 20, 2008 – 1:32 pmThis month the affiliate marketing industry had a death in the family. On June 15, 2008 the beFree platform known as BFAST was permanently turned off. Officially, the platform ceased tracking on May 15th but you could still log in and access reporting through June 15th.
beFree was, along with LinkShare, one of the two leading affiliate technology providers in the late 1990’s. By the time Commission Junction launched in November 1998, both beFree and LinkShare had relationships with all of the top e-retailers and were well on their way to success.
Started in 1996 in Waltham, MA by the Gerace brothers Tom and Sam, beFree’s strategy was to provide advertisers with the technology to create their own branded “in-house” type affiliate programs similar to what Amazon has today (and back then). Their first customer was Barnes and Noble. At the height of their success, they had some of the biggest online companies as customers like, Expedia, Best Buy, the GAP, Staples, PETsMART, HSN, Netflix, ShopNBC, Gateway Computers, Priceline, Proflowers and many, many more.
beFree raised $17.6 million in venture capital in August 1998 and later went public in November 1999 raising over $70 million. ValueClick bought beFree in May 2002 for $128.5 million.
ValueClick later purchased Commission Junction for $58 million in December 2003. beFree was combined with Commission Junction and it was determined in early 2004 to move forward with the Commission Junction platform and to migrate all of the beFree clients over and kill the BFAST platform. It took over 4 years for this to finally happen which shows how difficult it can be to merge companies and technologies.
I just wanted to mention that beFree helped build this industry and it is better off because of their efforts to educate marketers, innovate technologies and legitimize affiliate marketing. My hat goes off to all the people involved in launching and growing beFree from 1996 to 2004 - you know who you are and so do I. Thanks!
RIP
