You have to be somewhat in the know to even have heard the name "ClickBank" much less know what it is. This is funny because the truth is that ClickBank is far and away the largest internet marketplace for digital products and affiliates who want to sell them in the entire internet.
That puts ClickBank in its niche on a par with Amazon or Ebay and yet few have heard of ClickBank. It just keeps running smoothly serving the internet community without fanfare.
When ClickBank came along, it really stepped into a nightmare scenario of online marketing and smoothed out the rough edges. In the infancy of internet marketing getting set up as an online marketer meant you had to find someone to handle credit card payments.
To do this you had to have what was called a "merchant account" with an actual credit card company and the requirements to qualify for such an account were out of reach for most new internet merchants just trying to get established.
As an example, if you got your internet business up and running, you could not get a merchant account unless you were running a minimum of $1000 a month through your business. Of course, it was almost impossible to get that kind of business moving through your site if you could not offer credit card payment, so you were stuck.
But from the credit card company's point of view, they were protecting themselves if you sold something online and there were a lot of refunds to be processed which made the entire relationship unprofitable for them.
So, it was a lose lose situation for the credit companies and even more so for the new internet marketer just trying to catch a break in the business.