"The age of the affiliate" ...
 

Not to knock John, and I really mean that because I like the guy and I like NATS and use it myself ... but that saying, "the age of the affiliate" got me to thinking.

Imagine if you will walking in to the Chevrolet dealership down the road and saying "Hey guys, I'm going to take a couple of those Caddys, 4 Jimmys, 2 G6's and a handful of Vibes up the road to my lot and market them for you. When they sell, you guys can give me half..."

That'd be humerous enough if it ended there, but consider ...

" ... I'm also going to need a handful of your sales pamphlets, some promotional t-shirts and a copy of that huge banner you have above the lot. Just send that stuff down with a lot boy, who while he's around can hang the banner and give the cars a good wash for me."

"Also, I'm going to go ahead and charge my power and utilities to you, you don't mind, right? And I'll be using your phone lines and operators, because I don't want to handle any customer service really. Oh and to get it out up front, if there's any problems outside of either my or your control, well, I expect you to compensate me anyway."

I wonder how that'd go over?

Is the age of the affiliate starting or closer to an end?

Well, it is actually the dealerships that do that to the manufacturers. The dealership is the affiliate

Yes, but the dealership doesn't dictate to the manufacturer, rather, it's the other way around. The dealer is more like the marketing branch of the manufacturer, they can't, for instance, spam you with their cars :)

There will always be those with a product and those with traffic, as well as combinations of the two. What I'm hinting at here is the death of the middle man in between, with neither real traffic nor product.

I'm confused.

The site owner has the product. The affiliate has the traffic. Who is the middleman you're talking about?

Gallery submitters, traffic brokers, forum posters, emailers ...

interesting post.

I still see those as affiliates with traffic. Just because they buy traffic or their source can be cut off, doesn't mean they don't control traffic. It's "on-the-fly" or "generated" traffic as opposed to "static" traffic. Still traffic.

It's not really controlled traffic though. See, especially when you have to pay to get it yourself. Imagine a gallery submitter 5 years ago. Uses content, submits to tgp/mgp and provides content to that tgp in return for traffic back he can monetize.

Now, today, that same "affiliate" has to buy submission passes from GTS, to submit that content to the TGP/MGP in order to get traffic back. That costs more and more, and it's less attractive to be that affilaite ever day. Eventually the program owners will realize they don't need anyone to buy tgp spots to list their galleries ... they can buy tgp spots for their hosted galleries themselves and take 100% payouts on it. It's much cheaper than paying an "affilaite" half.

So a TGP owner that has a traffic cash gold banner on the top of his page sending traffic to their PPS program would indeed be a real affiliate, but is a tgp owner selling a paid advertising spot to traffic cash gold really an affiliate in the tradional sense of the word? Arguably no.

What do you mean by "eventually"? They have known that for years and there are still affiliates. Sure, the TGP affiliate will die someday when the model dies and then it will move on to a different model...

The problem with the "eventually" theory is you need somebody that can actually manage all of that... the program would be to pay an employee to actually give a shit about the success of the company. An employee like that is extremely difficult to find. With affiliates, you don't have to worry about that... they control their fate.

Billboard advertising agencies are brokers. They have existed for years. Mainstream ad networks are brokers. They have existed for years.

We disagree. :-)

Indeed :thumbsup

Thank you. That right there explains why the affiliate model will not die. There's NO RISK to the program owner by having an affiliate work for them, beauty part of it all is that since your the owner, you control the content. TeenRevenue is a good example - you can use promo content in the promo area/zip area all you want, but get caught using member side content and your cut off. No exceptions.

The people that keep wishing the affiliate model will die are those who are so greedy they want to BE the affiliate and program owner at the same time. There are some programs like that out there, and i've outlived some of them already.

It's good business to build partnerships any way you can. Period. :2 cents:

Well, all I can say is I'm an affiliate. I have been for more than 5 years. On some very large programs I'm probably in their top 5 percentile for lifetime affiliates.

From where I'm sitting, it's getting harder and margins are getting tighter. Don't get me wrong, I'm not doing badly, I'm just saying time they are a changing.

anyone who doesn't see the affiliates being squeezed out of the business is either a newb or has his head in the sand

Yeah, that slogan caught me as well. If anything, the "age of the affiliates" was years ago when they were the lifeblood of many of the programs.

I see now more as the "age of b2b cross sales/deals"

Programs are sharing their own established traffic. Affiliates are becoming a nuisance with their ever increasing payout demands and insane requests for tools/hosting/submitting/do everything for me/etc needs.

Remember when it used to be $25/sale and all you got were banners?

That's probably the difference between someone like myself who has their own server, tools, submitters, designers, etc. and someone who wants to freeload absolutely everything and make beer money on the weekends. It's too bad the affiliate model is tainted like that. :mad:

And I have never been against buying a membership anywhere to get custom content - just as long as i can sign under my own refcode (which I would notify the program owner of my intentions). Now if every program owner went back to doing that, we would see true affiliates coming back out (well at least ones with a credit card and legal age anyways)

sure, they can do that and take 100% of the sales, BUT they will now have another expense to cover whereas before the affiliate paid for that and sent them sales. Sure, the sponsor didn't get 100% for the sales, but they did not have to pay for a spot on tgps/mgps.

So, in reality, it's a win/win situation. Now just imagine if affiliates were killed completely. Now the sponsor gas to get their own traffic (bought or done by hired employees), pay for everything traffic, new employees, content, hosting etc.. etc.. Sure, they are now getting 100% of the $ for all sales, but now they have many more costs than before so they are not really getting ahead.

now, kill the affiliates and there will now be more sites out there that are FREE with all of your content.. Not samples, but FULL length movies and complete pic sets. (yes, there's that already, but with no affiates it would open the door for more sites to give out ALL FREE content that you charge for) Yet another expense to fight theft. That means lawyers, more employess monitoring shit and searchin all the sites which will equal even more expenses. Eventually there will be way to many costs that the sponsor will shut down.

Yep, some of this already happens. All the free full length video and all that shit, but I can guarantee that it would get worse. Than again it may just be the Tylenol 3 talking haha

I'll give a short general reply as I have 100 things going on ATM, LOL...

I don't think we are anywhere near the end of the affiliate model. In the nearly 12 years I've been in this business there is something new every 6 months that is going to "end" the business as we know it. This time around it is "tube sites" and stolen content killing the affiliate model. Things adapt, they always do.

What we are doing at TMM is bringing affiliates new powerful tools to allow them to maximize the earnings on their traffic. We are looking to usher in a new age and build upon what has been done with affiliates in this business.

Affiliates aren't going anywhere, TMM isn't going anywhere, there are only bigger and better things to come.

I'll bump this in 2 years :)

The dealer does dictate to the manufacturer these days. It was like that before. Cars were mass produced and the dealer got most of what was made. Now a company like ford has a rep that comes into the dealership, and he has to sell the cars to the dealer. As an affiliate manager gives reasons to people to send there program traffic.

there will always be companies that want to buy traffic from affiliates... gravy train may be gone, but getting customers for a % or fee is not a new thing in business...

hobbyists be gone