I really don’t know where she gets off on painting us all with this broad brush. Yeah – there are some sleazy operators, but to my knowledge – most of us who are active in the community and Summit look to expose them when we can.

Most of the people that I have met and choose to associate with in the business are top notch folks who work hard for their cash and add value as much as they can.

I know there are cookie stuffers, spammers, datafeed abusers, scrapers and other unsavory types within affiliate marketing. I am not and do not defend these practices. To the extent that these practices define our industry hurts us all just like a few slimy car salesmen hurt the auto industry.

In light of some negative perceptions within our space, I argue that those who are honest must do more than merely pursue the higher paths of excellence. Instead, we must build trust. A good start is to create quality solutions for people (and not merely content for bots). Of course we must never deceive. Give a “bakers dozen” instead of just the minimum expected – that builds goodwill. Reinvest profits. Think long-term. Offer real customer service and support. Become a trusted brand in our own right. The list goes on.

We can do this and lift up our industry. And even if things are as bad as Anne Kadet suggests, we can be a trusted haven within our circle of influence. Let’s do it!

Utilization of the datafeeds of merchants’ products paved the way to enormous amount of Internet spam among people who calls them affiliates. They have created millions, (billions?) of web pages, that are nothing but clone of the online stores they work with. So, it’s a fact that general Internet Spam and search engine spam is rampant among people who call themselves affiliates.

If you have good content and good traffic, you charge for advertising then use affiliate marketing for additional revenue if you know how. If you can’t get money for your page views, if you can’t get sponsors, if you can’t charge per click, then you accept commission-based structure to make money with your website. That makes it “bottom of the food chain”.

Anne Kadet’s article is bad; sloppily written without much insight, and with a clear negative point of view. As Todd Crawford said, most people who read it will not realize what she’s talking about.

Last month she wrote about Upromise, mentioning their $31 million revene in 2007:
http://www.smartmoney.com/toughcustomer/index.cfm?story=april2008-upromise
Someone who has even little journalism in her would have find out and point out that an important part of their revenue is generated via affiliate marketing. However, her claims are not baseless.

The real “hatchet job” to our industry was and is being done by people who are trying to represent affiliate marketing in general with their names and their companies every chance they get. Those who have worked with notorious spammers, then switced to affiliate marketing bringing their questionable judgements to our industry, by dirtying he mud for everyone. Those who, in the name of a bigger tent and more money, brought every CPA spammer to our industry. And by those industry forefront personalities, who see the blatant rip off of honest affiliates by loyaltyware/software affiliates and say or do nothing about although they have enough power to do so, in order to further their careers. And those who knew and stated these facts before, then went on the work with them on their sites.

There are great people in this industry and there are many questionable people. What ticks is me is those who do the “inside hatchet job” coming to “defend” affiliate marketers in cases like this. That’s what bullshit is.

Afterall, we all seem to know her by name now!

I for one intend to now forget her and get back to work!

Thanks,
Rex

Looks like she needs to work on her blog a bit more and then write an article..

As an example her article is entitled “A Penny for your clicks” she is expressing a cost per click (CPC) based model as a reference in her article title and her article content is associated with primarily cost per acquisition (CPA) driven based advertising attacks… Someone should clue her in on that…

We should consider however that this online marketing world is highly technical; acronym riddled, and mis-understood by many who do not have the technical tenacities that are required for true conceptualization of the online channels and its potentials. People like Anne Kadet peek into this world and show fear, irreverence, and animosity based on their inability to comprehend its complexities and the people who drive it.

Cheers,

Heather Paulson

I vented in my video here: http://missyward.com/?p=38.

I have to believe that she’s not as arrogant as she came off in the article.

Hopefully she won’t be as lazy as she was with this article when it’s time to print her retraction

Well, mine took longer to write (just teasing you). seriously, I think that the two posts compliment each other.

The tone by the author is on purpose the way it was for today’s article. I referred to the list of articles that she wrote prior to this one (incl. link). This seems to be the columns concept. The column where the article is published under is called “Tough Customer”. Go figure.

You can debate about it as much as you like. It depends on your taste and if she writes about you or somebody else, However, complaining and ranting are one thing, but taking things out of context, making assumptions based on little to none information and experience and build one on top of the other to form a picture about something that is completely distorted and far off the reality is another one and not acceptable.

I commented at the SmartMoney website and also sent an email to the editors of the magazine.

I also added references to yours and Shawn Collin’s post about this article in my post here at RN.

Cheers!
Carsten