Future of Affiliate Programs?

I think the entire ad market being in the sewers is effecting the affiliate programs area, as expected. Look at CJ, they won't even offer CPC anymore. Affiliate programs are kind of hit-and-miss, IMO. If you have a very, very specialized and targeted audience and offer your them ideas from affiliate programs, you are likely to do better than you would on a general site.

Like the advertising market, I think the affiliate programs market will recover later this year.

it's all about supply and demand.

too much supply by publishers, too little demand by advertisers.

Quote: Originally posted by fairhousing
it's all about supply and demand.

too much supply by publishers, too little demand by advertisers.

True, true. With Microsoft's billion dollar advertising campaign this fall/winter, things are expected to pick up. XP should boost computer sells, which should boost processor sells, software sells, and so forth. I think everything will turn around within the next year.

Should I contact microsoft to place a banner of XP on my site

Quote: Originally posted by Gyrbo
Should I contact microsoft to place a banner of XP on my site

Obviously, Microsoft's huge advertising budget for XP in the fourth quarter will mostly effect the big corporations and whatnot and that will adversely positively effect smaller sites and individuals. Hey, at least we can hope...

i don't think we'll ever see the like of 1999. internet hype was big and so were ad revenues.

I think too many website owners put too much hope on affiliates. They buy into the idea that they will just sit back and get paid for just providing a click-thru to the sellers site. Not so.

Also, I think too many sites get "affiliate happy", add way too many affiliates, many of which have little to do with the purpose of the site.

IMO, use affiliates to offer products or services that you either can't or won't offer yourself but are reasonable for the content of your site. Don't offer golf affiliates on a Nintendo site or cook books on a auto racing site.

Totally agree with that. Theres a proverb about focus that says 'If you aim for two rabbits you will get neither, if you aim for one then you will eat'. Or something like that!

Why bog down a site with not relevant links when you could target and make more money that way?

Commission Junction's new members agreement and consequently the new member's area show us what the problem of affiliate advertizing has been so far: too much testing to find out what affiliate programs are worth advertizing.

We already knew that CPC died because of widespread fraudolent activities of both merchants and affiliates.

CJ publishing the performance stats of each merchant revealed that some have enormous charge-back rates (up to 100% !!!), and others have extremely low conversion rates (from few pennies per EPC down to $0.00 in sales in 3 months !!!!!!).
Also bigmouthy statements have been naked off: some merchants still claim to have "15% conversion rate - the highest in its category!" or similar, but you can clearly see that the stats published on the very same page only show a miserable zero-comma-something rate...

I think affiliate advertizing will give us more satisfaction whith merchants beeing forced to act more professionally. For the nearest future I see Commission Junction almost monopolize the affiliates market for a while forcing other networks to follow their steps. That's what I hope, at least...

cpc dead, nah, i don't think so.

all forms of payments will continue on, they will only trade places from time to time as to which one is the most popular.

when i first began cpc was it. then cpa come aboard but it wasn't that big. then cpm came along and it was king. however, now it seems cpa is king, but cpc and cpm r still here.

I believe that there is still a lot of money in this business, just stick with it and it'll pay off...