What is linkshare: what is linkshare and its evolution to Rakuten Advertising

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When you hear the term "LinkShare," it can mean two different things, and the context really matters. It's a classic case of a brand name becoming synonymous with an action, kind of like how we "Google" something instead of saying we "search for it online."

First and foremost, LinkShare was the original name of one of the very first affiliate networks, a company that's now a global powerhouse known as Rakuten Advertising. But people also use the term "link sharing" to describe the simple, fundamental act of posting a URL online to drive traffic.

Understanding this dual meaning is the first step to getting a handle on performance marketing. One is a specific, historic company; the other is the basic action that makes the whole system work.

What's In a Name? The Brand vs. The Action

To get the full picture, it helps to remember what is affiliate marketing is all about. In a nutshell, it's a performance-based model where publishers (like bloggers or influencers) earn a commission for promoting a brand's products. The entire engine runs on one thing: a unique, trackable link.

This is where the two meanings of LinkShare collide.

LinkShare: The Company

The company, founded way back in 1996, was a true pioneer. It created one of the largest platforms connecting merchants who had products to sell with publishers who had an audience. Think of it as a digital matchmaker.

This platform handled all the messy stuff—tracking clicks, monitoring sales, and making sure affiliates got paid their commissions. It built a structured, reliable marketplace for these partnerships. In 2005, the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten saw the value and acquired LinkShare, eventually folding it into its massive global advertising network.

Link Sharing: The Action

The action of "link sharing" is exactly what it sounds like: distributing a hyperlink. But in marketing, it's never just any link. It’s a special URL embedded with tracking codes that tell the merchant exactly where a click or sale came from.

The original LinkShare network simply gave marketers the technology and opportunity to do this on a massive, profitable scale.

To make this crystal clear, here’s a simple breakdown of the two concepts.

LinkShare The Brand Versus The Action

Concept	Definition	Example
LinkShare (The Brand)	The original name for the pioneering affiliate network now called Rakuten Advertising. It’s a platform that connects merchants with publishers.	"I used to manage all my big retail partnerships through the LinkShare network before it officially became Rakuten."
Link Sharing (The Action)	The fundamental act of distributing a URL to drive traffic or sales. It's the core activity of affiliate and social media marketing.	"Our new campaign’s success depends entirely on effective link sharing across TikTok and our weekly newsletter."

So, while the brand gave the action a common name, the action itself is the universal practice that powers a huge chunk of the digital economy.

The Journey From LinkShare To Rakuten Advertising

To really get what LinkShare is all about, we have to rewind the clock. Back in 1996, LinkShare wasn’t just another tech startup; it was one of the originals, a pioneer that helped write the rulebook for modern affiliate marketing. It quickly earned a reputation as a solid, powerful platform that connected brands with a rapidly growing army of online publishers.

For the early wave of bloggers and content creators, LinkShare was a godsend. It gave them the tools and, more importantly, the access to partner with major brands, allowing them to turn their passion projects into actual businesses. On the flip side, it gave merchants a brand new, performance-based way to market their products that was both scalable and easy on the budget.

This early success didn't fly under the radar. The network blew up, becoming one of the biggest names in the digital ad space and proving that performance-based partnerships were here to stay.

A Landmark Acquisition

Then came 2005, a year that fundamentally shifted the affiliate marketing world. The Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten swooped in and acquired LinkShare in a massive deal valued at $425 million. At the time, this was the largest acquisition of an affiliate network ever, and it sent a shockwave through the industry. This wasn't just a niche market anymore—it was serious business.

This wasn't just a simple business deal; it was a huge validation of the entire affiliate model. Rakuten, a global force in online retail, recognized the incredible potential locked inside LinkShare’s network of publishers and advertisers.

The acquisition infused LinkShare with the kind of resources only a global corporation can provide, letting it expand its reach and seriously upgrade its tech. This marked the start of a new era, where the independent pioneer became a critical piece of an international e-commerce empire.

The Rebranding to Rakuten Affiliate Network

For almost a decade after the acquisition, the company kept its well-known name. But as Rakuten started pulling its global brands under one umbrella, a change was bound to happen.

In 2014, LinkShare was officially rebranded as the Rakuten Affiliate Network. A few years later, this was simplified even further to Rakuten Advertising, the name we know today. This move cemented its place within the massive Rakuten ecosystem, which spans everything from e-commerce and digital content to financial services.

This journey from a scrappy independent network to a core part of a global brand is a testament to the strength of its original vision. Many of the core ideas and technologies that made LinkShare a hit are still the engine driving Rakuten Advertising today. It’s why, even now, the name LinkShare still resonates so strongly with industry veterans.

For anyone serious about making it in this space, it pays to know who the top players are. You can check out our guide on the best affiliate marketing platforms to see how Rakuten stacks up against the competition. Understanding this history provides crucial context for the platforms and strategies that define performance marketing.

How An Affiliate Network Like LinkShare Actually Works

To really understand what's happening behind the scenes, think of an affiliate network like Rakuten Advertising (formerly LinkShare) as a trusted middleman. It's essentially a massive digital marketplace connecting brands that want to sell stuff with publishers who have an audience ready to listen.

This central hub manages the entire relationship, making sure everything from tracking clicks to paying commissions is handled smoothly. Without a network, every brand would have to build its own tracking system and recruit every single publisher one-by-one—a logistical nightmare, to say the least. The network streamlines this entire ecosystem. Before we dive deeper, it helps in understanding what an affiliate network is in the first place.

The Key Players On The Field

At its core, the network is all about a three-way partnership where everyone has a specific job to do. Each player is crucial for the system to work, creating a mutually beneficial relationship that drives sales and brings in revenue.

The Merchant (or Advertiser): This is the brand, the company that actually creates and sells the product or service. Their main goal is simple: get more sales and reach new customers by tapping into the network's pool of publishers.

The Publisher (or Affiliate): This is the content creator—the blogger, the influencer, the niche website owner—who promotes the merchant's products. Their goal is to earn a commission by sending traffic and sales through their unique affiliate links.

The Network (The Platform): This is the technology that glues it all together, like Rakuten Advertising. The network provides the infrastructure for tracking links, processing payments, reporting on how things are going, and making sure everyone plays by the rules.

This diagram shows how LinkShare started out and eventually became part of the massive Rakuten ecosystem.

You can see how a platform that was once a pioneer in the space evolved into a core piece of a global e-commerce powerhouse.

The Technology Behind The Handshake

So, how does a simple click on a blog post magically turn into a commission for the publisher? It all comes down to the tech powering the network. The whole process hinges on a special, trackable link.

When a publisher joins a merchant's program, they're given a unique affiliate link for that brand. This isn’t just your standard URL. It's packed with unique codes that tie it directly back to that specific publisher's account.

This tracking is the most critical piece of the puzzle. Our full guide on https://aliaslinks.com/blog/what-is-affiliate-advertising-complete-guide-performance-marketing gets into the nitty-gritty of the performance marketing mechanics that make it all happen.

When a reader clicks this link, a tiny file called a cookie gets placed on their browser. This cookie holds the publisher’s ID and acts like a digital breadcrumb, telling the merchant’s website exactly where that customer came from.

This system is all about fair and accurate attribution. Even if the customer leaves the site and comes back a week later to finally make the purchase, the publisher still gets paid as long as it's within that cookie window.

The network’s backend system keeps an eye on all this activity, crunches the numbers to calculate commissions, and automates the entire payment process. In the end, it sends one consolidated payment to the publisher from all their merchant partners. It's a system built for trust, scale, and efficiency.

The Hidden Risks Of Sharing Raw Affiliate Links

Affiliate networks like the original LinkShare give you the basic tools to make money—the trackable links. But if you're just copying and pasting those raw URLs directly into your content, you're setting yourself up for some serious, often hidden, problems. These links are almost always long, ugly, and packed with tracking codes that can scare away potential buyers.

Think about it from a user's perspective. They see a link like brand.com/products/item123?id=affiliate_id_987&session=xyz... and their internal alarm bells start ringing. It just looks spammy. That split-second of hesitation is enough to kill trust and tank your click-through rates before anyone even gets a chance to see the product you’re recommending.

The Financial Downfall Of Broken Links

Appearance aside, the biggest danger by far is the money you lose from broken links. Let’s say you have a blog post that's a real workhorse, pulling in thousands of visitors every month. One day, the merchant decides to update their website or discontinues the product you're promoting. Just like that, your raw affiliate link is dead.

Every click now leads to a 404 error. That's a lost sale, a lost commission, and a bad experience for your audience. A single broken link on a top-performing article can quietly drain hundreds or even thousands of dollars from your bank account over time, and you might not even realize it’s happening.

Now, multiply that risk across the hundreds of links you've scattered across blog posts, social media, and newsletters. It's simply impossible to manually check every single one. Without a system, your income is constantly exposed to this silent decay.

This is one of those hard lessons that separates casual affiliates from the pros. The top earners don't leave their income streams to chance; they actively manage and protect them.

Navigating Tracking Errors And Platform Policies

On top of broken links, you also have to worry about tracking failures. Sometimes, a user's browser settings or a complex redirect chain can prevent the affiliate cookie from setting correctly. When that happens, you drive a sale, but you never get paid for it. It's incredibly frustrating.

And it gets worse. Major ad platforms have gotten very picky about the links they'll allow. Social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have strict, often confusing, policies about affiliate links. Slapping a raw, clunky URL into your posts can easily trigger their automated systems.

This can lead to a cascade of problems:

Ad Rejection: Your campaigns can get shut down before they even start because the platform's algorithm flags your links as suspicious.

Reduced Reach: Your organic posts might get throttled, meaning fewer people in your hard-earned audience will ever see your promotion.

Account Suspension: Repeatedly trigger the alarms, and you could face a temporary or even permanent ban from the platform. It happens more than you'd think.

These platforms are obsessed with user experience, and those long, parameter-stuffed affiliate links are a huge red flag. To get around this, smart marketers have learned to clean up their links. You can dive deeper into this with a comprehensive guide to link cloaking for affiliate marketers, which breaks down how to turn those liabilities into assets. It’s not just about hiding a link; it's about protecting your business, ensuring you get paid, and staying on the right side of platform rules.

5. Protecting Your Revenue With Link Management Tools

Once you’ve seen the risks that come with raw affiliate links—from commissions vanishing into thin air to getting your ad account shut down—it’s pretty clear that just copying and pasting them isn't going to cut it. The answer isn't to stop sharing links, but to start controlling them. This is where professional link management tools come in, turning those fragile URLs into powerful, protected marketing assets.

The core of this strategy is a technique called link cloaking. Now, this isn't some shady trick. It's a standard marketing practice that takes those long, ugly affiliate URLs and turns them into clean, branded links that people actually trust. Instead of a potential customer seeing a confusing mess of tracking codes, they see a simple, professional link. That simple change builds confidence and gets you more clicks.

Having this kind of control from a central dashboard is the secret to protecting your revenue. It means you can make instant updates and see what's working across all your campaigns in one place.

This Is More Than Just a Basic URL Shortener

At first, you might think this sounds a lot like what a free URL shortener does. While services like Bitly are great for making a link shorter, they’re in a completely different league from a dedicated link management platform. Think of a free shortener as a quick bandage; a professional tool is a full-blown insurance policy for your income.

A basic shortener just points one link to another. A platform like AliasLinks, on the other hand, is built with a whole suite of features designed for serious marketers who need to protect their earnings and grow their business. That’s the critical difference that separates casual affiliates from the top earners.

These tools help you shift from being reactive—fixing problems after they’ve already cost you money—to being proactive, where your links are actively managed assets working for you around the clock.

How Management Tools Solve the Biggest Risks

A proper link management platform directly tackles the money and compliance headaches that are all too common in marketing today. It acts as your strategic defense against the most frequent points of failure, making sure all your hard work actually turns into revenue.

Here’s a look at how they solve the most critical problems:

Stop Losing Commissions: Say a product you're promoting goes out of stock or the merchant changes the URL. With a managed link, you can instantly redirect it to a new, relevant page. This means a link you put in a blog post two years ago can be updated in seconds without ever touching the original article, preventing 100% of the revenue loss from that broken link.

Stay Compliant with Ad Platforms: By creating clean, branded links, you fly under the radar of automated systems on platforms like Facebook and TikTok that hate raw affiliate links. This dramatically lowers the risk of your ads getting rejected or your account getting suspended.

Get Analytics That Actually Help: These tools give you the real story with detailed data on clicks, conversions, where your audience is, and what devices they're using. This is the kind of insight you need to figure out what’s working, optimize your campaigns, and make smart decisions that boost your ROI.

Guard Your Affiliate IDs: Link cloaking tucks your unique affiliate ID away inside the redirect. This makes it much harder for bad actors or sketchy browser extensions to strip your commission and steal the sale right out from under you.

By handling all these issues, a link management tool becomes the command center for your entire link sharing strategy.

Raw Affiliate Links Vs Managed Links With AliasLinks

To really see the difference, it helps to put a standard, raw affiliate link side-by-side with a professionally managed one from a platform like AliasLinks. The contrast makes it obvious why one is a vulnerability and the other is a strategic asset.

Attribute	Raw Affiliate Link	AliasLinks Managed Link
Appearance	Long, messy, and untrustworthy (e.g., `brand.com/product?id=xyz123...`)	Clean, branded, and professional (e.g., `yourbrand.com/recommends/product`)
Flexibility	Static and permanent. If it breaks, it’s broken everywhere it was posted.	Dynamic and editable. The destination URL can be changed anytime from a central dashboard.
Security	Exposes your affiliate ID, making you vulnerable to commission theft.	Hides your affiliate ID through cloaking, protecting your commissions.
Analytics	Provides only basic click data from the affiliate network, if any.	Offers rich, detailed analytics on click-through rates, user location, device, and more.

In the end, relying on raw links is like building a business on rented land—you have no real control. Using a dedicated tool gives you ownership over your links, turning them into a reliable and scalable source of revenue.

For a closer look at the nuts and bolts, check out our guide on how a link cloaker works to secure your marketing efforts. Understanding this is fundamental to protecting your income in today's competitive affiliate space.

Answering Your Questions About LinkShare and Affiliate Marketing

As you dive into the world of affiliate marketing, a few questions always seem to pop up, especially around older platforms like the original LinkShare. Let's clear the air on some of the most common points of confusion so you can move forward with confidence.

Does The LinkShare Company Still Exist?

Not in name, but its legacy is stronger than ever. The company everyone knew as LinkShare was bought by the e-commerce powerhouse Rakuten and officially took on a new name in 2014.

Today, it operates as Rakuten Advertising, which has grown into one of the biggest and most respected affiliate networks on the planet. If you're looking for the original LinkShare, you’ll find its DNA inside Rakuten Advertising—same mission, but now with a ton more global firepower behind it.

What Is The Difference Between An Affiliate Network And An Affiliate Program?

This is a classic point of confusion, but the distinction is actually pretty simple. The easiest way to think about it is like a massive shopping mall versus a single, standalone boutique.

An affiliate network (like Rakuten) is the shopping mall. It’s a huge, centralized marketplace that brings thousands of different brands and merchants under one roof and connects them with an army of publishers. The network handles all the messy stuff—tracking, reporting, and payments—for everyone involved.

An affiliate program is the standalone boutique. It's run by a single company, like the famous Amazon Associates program. While some massive brands have the resources to run their own programs, many also list their programs within a network to get in front of a much larger pool of potential partners.

Why Not Just Use A Free URL Shortener?

Look, for sharing a funny video with a friend, a free URL shortener is totally fine. But for a professional marketing campaign where every click matters? They just don't cut it. They're missing the critical features you need to actually protect your income and run your business effectively.

Is Link Cloaking A Safe Practice For Social Media?

Absolutely, as long as you’re doing it for the right reasons. Link cloaking is simply a way to turn a long, clunky, and ugly affiliate URL into a clean, branded link that people actually trust enough to click. The golden rule is transparency: the destination page has to be exactly what the user expects.

The only time you'll run into trouble is if you're trying to mislead people or sneak past a platform's rules by promoting something forbidden. Modern tools are designed to help you build brand trust and look professional, not get your account banned.

Ready to stop losing commissions to broken links and platform restrictions? AliasLinks gives you the power to create clean, branded, and fully managed links that protect your revenue and boost your click-through rates. Try it free for 7 days and see the difference at https://aliaslinks.com.