Calacanis and the Real Hurdles for Affiliate Marketing

My biggest takeaway from this year’s Affiliate Summit is that affiliate marketing, in all of its vastness and iterations, has a tremendous amount of promise for the burgeoning number of individuals actively creating content online.

Content creation should be something that is based on an internal characteristic like passion, emotion, interest, love, hate, faith, etc. As web content creation tools such as blogging platforms, social networks and multimedia tools (YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Wordpress) continue to lower their barriers to entry, there will certainly be more individuals putting more of themselves and their viewpoints on the web.

While some content creators will choose to not monetize their work or created content, many will. The key to that amateur monetization, parallel to content creation itself, is a lower barrier to entry. While it may seem common sense to affiliate marketing professionals, finding ways to responsibly monetize content is not common sense. It takes work and at least a few hours of time to understand how to use an affiliate network, or even AdSense.

While affiliate networks do have a rather substantial barrier to entry, affiliate marketing in general is much more intelligible and accessible than other forms of web advertising, and I believe that is where the future for our industry lies.

While I do agree with Jason Calacanis’ basic premise that web content creation should always strive for the best and focus on quality and community rather than quick profit, I don’t think web spam is the biggest hurdle for affiliate marketing (or search engines for that matter). Instead, the biggest hurdle for our industry in the coming years is our ability to open the doors to new content creators who want to find ways to responsibly monetize the content they are creating.

Over the last 15 years of our time with the world wide web, the major cultural shift of deconstruction has found a home in cyberspace. In other words, previous ideas of “quality,” or “good” and “bad” that dominated our material culture in the 20th century have eroded and instead of a meta understanding of what constitutes the sort of quality content that Calacanis evangelizes with Mahalo’s human powered search is shifting to a recognition of the power of individual relativism.

This is important for web content creation and monetization. Whereas I have my own personal understanding of what quality content means, my definition will differ from yours. I write differently than you, I have a different take on how much monetization is responsible on a blog than you, and I think, feel and live differently than you.

So, rather than attempting to prop up the crumbling pillar of what quality web content might mean (or not mean, let’s embrace the chaos and uncertainty of deconstruction and let the market(s) decide what is valuable and responsible instead of dictating an outdated meta sense of quality. That’s not to say that we should stand for spam and web pollution. Fight it with your attention and your dollars and links. That will be a much better deterrent than attempting to build a spam-free platform.

And that is where I feel affiliate marketing has the most potential in the future.

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