Clickbank is one of the better affiliate networks and part of this is because they share all kinds of information with you about the affiliate products you’re looking at in their marketplace. Yesterday I did a video on how to navigate the Clickbank Marketplace and what you can learn from the various stats to find the best affiliate product – something which you should take with a sizable grain of salt mind you.

What is Clickbank Gravity

Of all of the different Clickbank stats, the most dubious of the all is “gravity”. I’ll identify what exactly Clickbank gravity is today as well as give you the skinny on how it is calculated.

Here is a pic of the changes in gravity in the last month since the CellSqueeze product launched on Clickbank and has subsequently gone on to become the highest gravity product on the network.

So what is Clickbank gravity? The affiliate network itself defines it as the “number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.”

The maximum amount which any one affiliate can contribute to the gravity of a product is 1, i.e. if 10 affiliates each made one sale in one day, the gravity would increase by 10; if 1 affiliate made 10 sales in one day, the gravity would only increase by 1.

With one being the maximum, that number tapers off slowly according to how recently that commission was logged. Each day in which you don’t generate a new sale of that product, that gravity drops a few hundredths.

Each time you log a new sale, your contributed gravity returns to 1. If you haven’t logged a sale on that product after 8 weeks, your diminishing portion of the gravity disappears completely.

Don’t obsess over gravity too much. Newbie affiliates put much too stock into the value of gravity at times and will promote a product with a high gravity under the assumption that a lot of affiliates are making money from it. Gravity can be significantly influenced artificially by a merchant/product owner in a number of ways.

One instance of this is when the merchant creates dozens if not hundreds of affiliate accounts on Clickbank, which is free to do, then purchases that product knowing that all of the commissions are going to come back to them between the affiliate and merchant commissions, minus a small cut from Clickbank.

This sends the gravity skyrocketing overnight and it takes awhile for it to substantially come down and in that time the merchant can attract tons of affiliates just through their shiny high gravity stat.