An interesting week for the world of voucher codes it seems. Fresh from reading a piece in the Sunday Times about Mark Pearson over the weekend, a 28 year old who has built a £30m Fortune from Affiliate Marketing.  I read with interest some fascinating facts and figures about voucher code usage from Hitwise.

This surge in voucher code usage is something that Internet Retailing is calling the emergence of the ‘maximising consumer’, I quite like this term as it demonstrates that consumers are not just looking for the cheapest price from often biased shopping comparison search engines but taking longer to look for value added offers and deals.

This trend will certainly have implications on Affiliate Marketing and Search channels as more cookies are dropped along a shoppers journey to the basket and adds to the debate on both de-duplication and allocation of commission to affiliates over other channels in the mix.

It also rightly does point out that the voucher code market is still a little murky, due to some historical and present spammy and volatile methods used by some sites to acquire traffic over user experience - something I think Google will take action on at some stage.

Despite the mass of voucher codes sites in existence and I’m talking over 200 - I can see a core handful of companies taking this channel by the horns followed by a number syndicated and white label offerings and thankfully a total clean up of this internal channel.

Also good news for our wee project Restaurant Vouchers though, as the report states that searches for the term have increased by 226.3% over the last 12 months!

More stories on this over at Google News.