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I am enormously entertained by the number of people on this board who refer to the death of affiliates in the same breath as the enormous scammy PPS payouts.
There was a huge wave of bad credit card billing that was just going away when I entered the business in 2002. Now, it's back. It will soon be going away again. And the get-rich-quick artists who chased those $100+ payouts will, indeed, go the way of the dinosaurs, if they don't change their methods.
But the basic model of paying affiliates a share of revenue for referred customers? I don't think that will go away until people stop buying porn over the web -- which could indeed happen, but probably not in 2009 or even 2010.
I do sometimes hear from program owners who think they don't need affiliates or our traffic. OK fine. But, for every one of those, I hear from dozens who want me to join their affiliate program. And as for cutting out the middleman? My standard polite decline to join a program is to offer some ad space for sale; and the response I usually get is like they are the vampire and I'm the garlic. They don't WANT to cut out the middleman and keep all the profit; what they want is to shuffle all the risk off onto their affiliates, so they don't need to worry about ROI.
Until they start offering to buy adspace instead of soliciting me to join their programs, I don't see "the death of the affiliates" as a big worry.
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