They don't charge anything for people to publish hop links, and I don't think they charge the people that list their e-books or whatever, right? So how do they profit?
They charge $50 per product vendors set up and take a generous Clickbank Fee out of every transaction. If my product is $29.95 then i get around $27.60 from each sale... and cb takes the $2.35. Now imagine that hundreds and hundreds of thousands times over.
on the CB website it says they process nearly 20,000 orders per day. That is more than $20,000 per day since they get a flat rate of $1 per order, then the 7.5%. They also say they have over 10,000 publishers which had to each pay a 50 activation fee, so they earned over $500,000 from those fees.
no doubt CB is raking it in... their new layout is nice but they do have some reporting errors. It's a common subject of discussion over at ewealth (link in sig).
They also hold back part of your money each month, so presumably they make lots of interest on that too.
also i remember i read at there website one day that they take about 2 or 3 bucks per check processing.
CB is the "big guys" they make like $50k a day, maybe even $100k a day! They take a comission out of each sale then you get whatever comission the merchant sets(ive seen 75%) and the merchant gets the rest. The good thing is other people are making money for the merchant and the cost of bandwith for him is very little, many of them sell ebooks and other non physical programs or software.
They do normally gain commissions on each sale and with the amount of orders they get per day, you can imagine how much they will ranking in.It is possible that they make interest on their clients money before releasing payment.