Epidemic attempted to generate marketing revenue by paying customers to attach links to internet businesses in their outgoing mail.
[1] Presumably, after seeing their websites jump in popularity, clients would pay Epidemic a greater amount than was paid to customers.
Although Epidemic considered its efforts as viral marketing, it operated in a very similar fashion to spam and bot nets, albeit with willing end-users who were receiving paid compensation.
According to national account manager James Wallen, the ad drew "little response from consumers but helped to attract important business partners.
As of April 2018, there exists an unrelated Denver-based search engine optimization company also named Epidemic Marketing.