Adam’s Online Marketing Predictions for the Future

Revenue Magazine is putting together their 2nd anniversary issue and has sent out a list of questions to experts, gurus, and industry watchers to get their opinions on the recent changes in online marketing and to ask for predictions for the future (next two years). It was an interesting exercise answering her questions and I wanted to share some of my future predictions with the Revenews readers to get your thoughts and opinions.

Here they are:

Paid Search: Prices for top keywords will keep rising as companies continue to compete for top spots. Finding paid search keyword bargains will get harder and harder as the search engine’s technologies for broad matching high priced terms to less search terms get more advanced. As the price of keywords becomes more of an efficient market, the search engines will eat up most of the margins that paid search affiliates live on.

Affiliate Networks: As the keyword bid prices keep rising and contextual advertising technologies continue to get better and showing the right ads at the right times, online publishers are going to find it increasingly easier and more profitable to display contextual ads that update automatically updated, have a single source of reporting, and a single source of payment. This will be a big hurdle for the affiliate networks moving forward.

RSS Feeds: In response to the growth and competition from contextual advertising, Affiliate networks will provide tools to make it easier for merchants to providing products, links, and deals as personalized RSS feeds for their top affiliates. This will enable these partners to automatically pull pre-coded offers into their site automatically.

Consolidation: We are already seeing a lot of consolidation in the online marketing companies, just look at ValueWeb. I predict that in the next two years we will see some consolidation and organization in the top tier affiliate marketers as well. The changing search landscape will make it important for top affiliates to be larger with more automated tracking and bidding technologies. The larger size will also enable them to command higher commission rates from competing merchants. Ultimately this larger company will be acquired by the networks themselves or from a Madison Avenue firm looking to beef up their search offerings to make up for the shortfall in other areas of offline advertising.

What do you think? Agree, Disagree, other Predictions?

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