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AOL first entered the affiliate arena by buying Advertising.com back in 2004. Advertising.com offers an advertising network (including affiliate CPA activity) to agencies and advertisers.

Now they have acquired privately-held buy.at to strengthen Advertising.com - and in my opinion they also wanted to take an emerging player out of the affiliate game before it became too expensive.

During some office banter, a colleague and I joked about who would buy the remaining independent affiliate networks - and I joked Microsoft would.

Hang on...is that such a surprising idea?

Putting aside the fact MS is going to be tied up in a corporate chess game with Google over the next few months, isn't affiliate marketing an area Microsoft (or rather its MSN/Live division) lacks?

MSN/Live today includes:

• Natural Search (no revenue, but vital to attract a user base)
• Paid Search (PPC revenue)
• Shopping Search (PPC revenue)
• Maps and Local Results (ad revenue, although not a mature product or revenue stream yet)
• Live Messenger (display advertising revenue)
• Hotmail (display revenue)
• MSN and other properties (display and partnership revenues)

But...no affiliate network.

AOL now has one (two if you place the CPA element of Advertising.com in this category) - and Google and Yahoo have none.

That's a missing revenue stream and one less chance to access hundreds of advertisers on one hand and thousands of website owners on the other.

Affiliates are a major part of the online landscape and a client acquisition strategy we recommend to many of our clients - so why would Microsoft not want to capture part of this lucrative market?

Or Google for that matter - affiliate scheme members aren't that far away from AdSense publishers...cross sell, anyone?