ClickBank MarketPlace Database Statistics

Where is the data coming from?

Every day ClickBank releases a file called ClickBank Marketplace XML feed. This is huge XML file that contains more than 160,000 records. The Marketplace XML is organized in a hierarchal way, just like folders and files on a hard drive. The top level contains nine main categories. No products can be added to the main categories directly. The main categories are populated by the ClickBank script on the bases of the historical popularity of products. The more popular a product is, the higher in a main category it is listed.

Then there are subcategories. Each ClickBank main category has approximately nine subcategories. When a new product is added to ClickBank Marketplace, it is placed into up to two subcategories and into the special subcategory called "New Products" - all new products are added to this subcategory.

As a result, each product gets listed at least four times in the XML feed. The popularity values are calculated separately for each category whereas gravity, earned per sale, and etc. values are the same across all categories.

If you are interested in looking at the ClickBank marketplace xml feed you can download it here (v1) or here (v2). It is a rather large file (the compressed zip file is around 4.3MB and the extracted xml file is around 23.5MB). Do not use the web browser to view the file, use notepad, textpad, or some other text editing tool. I use Notepad++ to work with text, xml, and other files.

Now, the xml file by itself is not very useful. So, I wrote a utility that converts it to a MySQL database. So, I download, convert, and update the MySQL database every day. So, in a nutshell, that is where the data is coming from. As you can see, I am not creating any data myself, I simply make the data that is released by ClickBank accessible.