The end of Affiliate Marketing! Again?

Adam Viener’s post called “Yahoo Coupons Get Top Results – Search Engines Become Affiliates” from last Tuesday sparked a chain of comments that lasted all week. Over 50 comments altogether.

I was reading through the comments and made one comment already, then thought about it and started a second comment. It become too long because I wanted to bring some points across, addressing multiple things, mentioned in the discussion, which would have been buried under the pile of comments. I decided to blog about it instead .

I am “stealing” the image from Adam’s blog here at RN and hope he will forgive me and not kill my blog with a lethal code injection hehe. It shows coupons using affiliate links from Yahoo! Shortcuts at the top of the organicYahoo! search results.

Its funny how the appearance of one thing that can’t be explained immediately but looks scary causes predictions for the end of all Affiliate Marketing. Well I for my part survived a few of those End of AM events and smile.

My bet, without even looking at the detail of the link, is that its paid inclusion. Yahoo! is rolling out new stuff out all the time now too, like Google. BTW. some of the Google Tests could also make affiliate links appear as top search result. Google Co-Op rings a bell? Noticed changes to Google Base? Anybody?

Froogle, Google’s free comparison shopping site also had a lot of affiliates that slipped through and were able to get their affiliate links into the results.

ShopWiki also grabs Affiliate Pages and shows the affiliate as Merchant in the result. Okay they are new and probably didn’t know better.

Jim Kukral’s comment made me smile at first, but I believe he meant it seriously

I’ve contended that the se’s would find a way to become 100% paid eventually since 2001. It’s one of the reasons I got out of the seo business. I always imagined a big yellow pages. Who knows, but it certainly is a possibility. I don’t really think it’s going to happen, but it could…

I don’t believe that Google, Yahoo! and MS Search will make the transition to paid search results only.

That would be a complete change of their core business. Most of the content on the Internet is not commercial and most people look for this non commercial content. The same people do also use the SE to look for commercial content once in a while, but nobody is a 24h shopper spending a fortune online every day.

If the big SE stop delivering free content from free websites, customers will not have a reason anymore to use them as often as they do now. The void would be filled quickly by somebody else.
Giving something for free to customers to build interest and trust to later also make money from them is as old as Sales itself. That will not change.

Now lets assume Yahoo! is involved in this to test it out. No big detail either, they would not be the first Search Engine that taps into Affiliate Marketing as alternative revenue source.

Looksmart did the same (or are still doing it). Okay they used paid inclusion and not organic search and advertisers that did not pay for pages to be included, but have an affiliate program were for Looksmart as good (or better) as the ones that just paid for the listings (and clicks).

Yahoo! Product Submit is paid inclusion. Yahoo! might be thinking the same as Looksmart back then. Paid is paid no matter the details PPC, CPA, CPS. Doing that with organic listings is unlikely, but for sponsored listings? Why not?

It would be an alternative to PPC. An alternative that is actually beneficial for the Advertiser and dwarf Googles way of doing CPA (not live yet, but they are testing it)

Let Yahoo! figure out when and where to show advertisement and pay only if the advertisement results in traffic AND converts. Much more powerful than Google’s CPA attempts. Bye bye Click Fraud at the same time and if the SE do a good job figuring out the ads to show to whom and when to maximise conversion, then this could be much more profitable for them, then PPC.

Also consider the savings in overhead costl the PPC service causes for the SEs, PPC Accounts to manage, extensive customer service (compared to organic search) and so on and so forth. Not with CPA/CPS plugged in. Sign up, launch and sending a bill every month (or waiting for the commission check), the rest is done by the algorithms. I would be surprised, if Google would not be looking into this, especially after all this Click Fraud issues and Advertisers demanding actions.

Either case, SE involved or not, nothing is going to happen that will destroy Affiliate Marketing. Will it change? of course it will, it always does. And some people are scared of change, they always are. Adapt, better exploit, be one of the first that leverages new trends and technologies. If one of the new stuff breaks out and becomes mainstream, you are already there and ready to cash the commission checks.

Affiliate Marketing is Performance Marketing, remember?