Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
It has always been my feeling that the affiliate system will die when programs find new ways to get traffic without having to pay so much. Why pay 50% or $105 or whatever if you can pay 10 cents a click and score 1 in 100 "borrowing" surfers from other sites?
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You are skipping a few points...
First that if the average affiliate is as big a drain on resources as arguments like your suggest, who is to blame except the sponsors themselves? They drove the payouts up by not having the imagination (most of them) to compete on any other level. They make zero effort to identify and assist affiliates who show potential for further development. They spend almost all their affiliate marketing budgets on impressing other sponsors and attempting to pull in newbies. There is a vast army of affiliates, yet the typical sponsor does absolutely nothing of practical value except give them the URL's for some banners, galleries, etc.
The other major flaw in your reasoning is that the hundreds of thousands of sites which provide traffic, directly or indirectly, for virtually every traffic source, are affiliate sites. Not only are these webmasters the source of the scumware operators' traffic, but they fuel TGP's, directories, sponsors' own consoles... you name it. You can change the affiliates role. You can call them something else. But so long as traffic has a value, they will not be going anywhere.
And it's a damned good thing, because as someone else pointed out, if sponsors encourage anything approaching a monopoly or "club" of traffic sources, they won't get more traffic: it will just become more expensive. The existence of "affiliates" is what ensures that no-one's business is held to ransom.
As I have already written somewhere here, we have enough cowboys running big sponsor programs that I'm sure some will go that route. But hopefully more are smart enough to realize that the solution is not to get rid of affiliates but to utilize them better.