The end of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing will never end as long as producers of products want to reach a wifder audience. As a service it will always have a value, it may well change. What am I talking about it will change but at the ned of the day it will remain a legitimate service. As big says "Not likely...not by a long shot!"
La dominatrix

I can see the reasons behind it.

Blogs are trusted sites designed to blog about every day experiences, observations and viewpoints, not to promote IM products.

Blogs have been extremely abused for years now, and the average blog reader is finding it increasingly difficulty to know what is genuine and what is a biased sales pitch.

I personally think that all IM'ers should use websites configured for purpose.

Anyone using a blog for IM now will always be wondering whether they will get spotted or reported for promoting affiliate products, so time to change is now.

Not a chance of the affiliate system being destroyed.

Sure more roadblocks will be built but savvy and well informed affiliates will always earn good money.

TL

It isn't about affiliate marketing it is about affiliate marketing on blogs.

Create a normal site, i.e. not in blog format and it is a non issue.

YES, if affiliate marketing was "posting fake reviews on blogs" .

But that is not the case. This is just a tiny method and will by no means mean the end of affiliate marketing.

The end of affiliate marketing??!?!

What are you talking about?

All my subscribers know that I'm an affiliate. I never hide the fact that I'm getting paid and that's why I'm so successful with them. I have to other list in other niches which I can't really tell them that I'm an affiliate and they are not responsive at all.

Affiliate marketing is not coming to an end, I can assure you of that. The FTC is cracking down on flogs (fake blogs) for good reason and a lot of it has to do with the government grant flogs that were EVERYWHERE a few months ago.

A lot of affiliate marketers made a great deal of money the "lazy way" with those flogs. Particularly before Facebook cracked down on them advertising there. It really was a "cash grab" for a while.

Were they ethical? Well, that depends...

How ethical is a celebrity endorsement for a product? Does Jamie Lee Curtis really scarf down Activia all the time? Does Tiger Woods really drive a Buick Enclave?

Of course, I'm not taking the position that flogs are ethical, my point is that there are very, very gray areas still left to be partitioned into what is "acceptable" and "not acceptable" for affiliate marketing. Since this industry is so young, its taking legislators this long to finally start to look into the business - for better or for worse. And they only showed this much interest after being swamped with complaints about shady rebilling practices by the advertisers.

Sorry to go off-topic, but I felt that some back story was warranted to help give you some perspective that the sky is not falling and there will be plenty of products/services for you, I, and everyone else here to promote for years to come.

-DareDevil

plasticman,

If we accept that "caveat emptor" is the only motto that the capitalistic society should honour... then we gave a lot of ammunition to floggers to defend their unethical, dishonest way of doing business by putting fake testimonials, lies etc. on their sites - because you agree with them that ALL the responsibility should be on the visitors/readers/buyers shoulder. Is it really that what you want to promote?

Wow.. cool! Now, there won't be anymore of dick pill ads.

Affiliate marketing, per se, has been around FAR longer than the internet.

Basically anyone that gets paid a commission for anything is essentially an affiliate - offline as well. That's the basic model; affiliate marketing as we tend to think of it has just made that same concept very easy for anyone to get into on the internet.

The end of affiliate marketing? Definitely not. Might keep a couple more people out of the game, but there are always ways around it too.. You should have a disclaimer/privacy policy or something on your blog/site anyways; Google likes those.

Might make sense actually. In Australia a couple of radio commentators got into alot of trouble for "Cash for Comments", where they would talk up products on-air but not mention they were being paid to do so.

Bit hard to distinguish between entertainment and advertising these days anyway

What about blogs where you have, say, Amazon ads embedded as blog posts? I'm not reviewing or saying anything about them in that case. They are just there. they are a blog entry, but anyone with half a brain can tell it's not a review post.

I can't wait until this overreaching liberal government goes down in flames, hopefully in the next midterm elections to send a message and then for good in 2012. I knew these people were going to be nothing but trouble.

When you realize that "affiliate marketing" is simply another term for a company having a "commissioned salesperson" who is working as an independent contractor instead of as an employee, you'll quickly realize that affiliate marketing is not going to end.

It is a common and well-established means for obtaining customers.

All the FTC is looking for is more transparency in online recommendations to combat fraud. That is so easy to comply with it is a non-issue.

I'm really not a fan of these 'the end of...' threads. I mean, let be realistic when starting on topics and not use the element of fear to spark conversation.
surely there's more positive things to focus on...
just my opinion.

I wouldn't mind if I could just cover it with a sentence in my TOS, but I fear that every post will need a disclaimer thus making the whole thing so impractical as to be nigh impossible to continue. Hopefully this is a non issue because I have my doubts that something as slow and as inefficient as government could ever hope to police all of the blogs out there. Maybe they'll be too busy chasing after the totally automated scam blogs.

Shall we Also say

" We Get Paid When You Click On Ads! and When You Opt In To My Newsletter, There is A Chance i Will Make Money off You "

Having the regulations is not an issue and would protect the consumers. I just feel that no one nations government should be able to impose any regulation on the internet. This sanctions should come from an international organization which governs content on the world wide web. State governments have no business in the world wide web it transcends borders and needs to be treated as such.

The end of affiliate marketing?
I dont believe that for a second, Im sure true internet marketers can adapt to this, you just have to get creative, and creatively bend the rules

Bloggers should have to say whether they are getting paid for their endorsements. It is so hard to believe that any of the endorsements on the internet are real nowadays.

Alexa, I love your posts so this isn't a criticism. You said, "Liberty, in this context, meaning 'liberty to conceal the truth from people', perhaps?" Not easy to imagine that's quite what Benjamin Franklin had in mind, is it."

However, if we were to jail everyone who concealed the truth from others, the House, Senate, and office of the president couldn't assemble a quorum to conduct business. Just a thought Alexa--keep up the good posts!

Beginning Of Rant: I have seen a lot of people post against putting up blogs to promote products as affiliates which they have never bought or seen personally. I do this all the time and I make no apology for it to anyone. I tell visitors right up front that I am an affiliate, and in many cases I have openly mentioned that I have not purchased the product. On such blogs I have included free information valuable to affiliate marketers. I make no false claims, nor do I make any earnings promises. I simply describe the product from information I have collected.

I do not call these review sites--they are not. I am promoting a product. But the reason people come to my pages and order through my links is 95% due to the unique and substantial bonuses I offer. This is no different than a car dealership offering free gas for a year, free oil changes, or free inspections if you buy through their franchise. It's about the bonuses and it is a totally legitimate and honorable way to do business. It's only when people make fake claims and/or use misleading testimonials that deception occurs.

I do not demand that a car salesman have driven a car I buy from them. I do not require a Realtor have lived in a house that I buy through them. I do not require that an affiliate marketer purchase and read a product before promoting it. Just an opinion. When I buy a product online I never buy from the vendor--I always buy through an affiliate so I can get a bunch of free stuff.

If you look at goobers' pitch pages for new products you will find that in the vast majority of cases, their testimonials come from fellow uber-goober-affiliates in on the product launch. That falls into a greyish area, however, in my opinion.

Back to the review pages. If you have a problem with bloggers setting up pre-sell pages to promote products they haven't purchased and read themselves, then--you must surely be aghast at your own government's activities. Over the past six months we have witnessed time and time again, rules committees in both the House and Senate put 1,000-page bills up for votes without even 24 hour periods for reviews by House & Senate members.

My question to you is this: If your congressmen vote to pass a bill (providing an implicit testimonial or vote of confidence for it) without ever reading the bill themselves--should that act fall under the FTC proposed rule for review pages or testimonials? It is no different that what the FTC proposed--additionally, many of the legislators receive donations from companies who profit from the legislation. There is some deceptive marketing for you.

The purpose of the government of our republic, in the eyes of every objectivist, and in the intent of the founding fathers, is/was to protect our personal property and our liberties. Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more! Nothing more!

Anything else the thieving robber barons of government do falls under personal profiteering or social engineering, neither of which I find mentioned in the Constitution.

Affiliate marketing never will die, affiliate marketing is living so long how long are living market- thousands years, and to talk about end...

I think this has been taken out of context.

Affiliate marketing lives on. In fact in a few years it will be the very backbone of eCommerce. Paying commissions on sales has worked for the last 200 years and will work for the next 200 years.

But that is not the issue.

The issue is perception.

The general public, the casual web browsing type, perceives a blog as an authority and the author an expert, thereby adding disproportionate weight to the blog posts.

We all know blogs are horribly abused. There have been plenty of "products" out there that create them by the million and automatically fill them full of junk.

The main issue though is where the blog author reviews a bunch of products, or recommends a single product, for no other reason that he makes $50 per sale, while presenting the product as the best thing since sliced bread, not ever having seen it.

How many people here actually purchase the products they promote? Be honest.

If the FTC targets blogs that would be good for the Internet. The proper platform would be Joomla or XSite Pro based sites or whatever, that actually look like review or affiliate sites.

I have seen countless blogs that could get busted by the FTC. Frank Kern got busted a few years back for far less.

As the saying goes - there is no smoke without fire.

As long as you're honest, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. It's not a coincidence, either, that honest marketing is the only long-term business plan that works for all of the successful marketers here on WarriorForum.

If the FTC later does attempt to crack down too hard on us innocent folk, though, they'll be in a tizzy fit over the amount of web businesses and affiliate programs that will become hosted, registered, & servered in third world countries rather than here.

But knowing the FTC, they'll probably try to enforce some "All U.S. citizens must register and host all of their online endeavors within the United States" type of law sometime down the road.. but no, affiliate marketers will always be one step ahead. Kind of like drug kingpins, except it's the FTC instead of the DEA trying to bring us down.

I love sensationalism.