Back in the early 2000s, there was not a lot of data on affiliate marketing, and I wanted to know more about what was going on. So I decided to make my own report of statistics on the industry and registered AffStat.com on October 29, 2002.
The first report came out in the spring of 2003 and I gave a presentation on it at the Affiliate Force conference, which took place April 24-28, 2003 aboard the Carnival Imagination cruise ship.
At the time I was the ClubMom.com Affiliate Manager, as well as the President of the US chapter of the Internet Affiliate Marketing Association.
It was during this cruise conference that Missy Ward and I presented together in a session for the first time.
It was also the time the two of us became disenfranchised with Affiliate Force and the work we were doing to build it up. So we made plans to launch our own conference, which could have easily faded away as nonsense we spouted off about at one of the cruise bars.
But we got on the phone a couple of weeks later and AffiliateSummit.com was registered on May 19, 2003.
Less than six months later we had our first event, and there was never another Affiliate Force.
Over the years AffStat was folded into Affiliate Summit.