No Surprise: The Future of Affiliate Marketing will be decided by Affiliates.
Among the many differences businesspeople imagine exist between online commerce and offline commerce, there are a few false differences. One imaginary difference that troubles me relates to Affiliate Marketing, and what it means to be an Affiliate.
Mr. Bezos' patent notwithstanding, the fundamental relationship between an Affiliate and a Sponsor is as old as business itself.
Basically, anyone who is marketing something for you is your Affiliate.
The problem with seeing this truth clearly relates to the large number of business relationships that would fall under such a vague category, and to the great subjectivity of the question.
When a retail grocer chooses a certain brand of corn from a certain wholesaler to place on his shelf, many factors may have influenced that decision. Everything from price, to stocking fees, to the fact that his daughter is married to the wholesaler.
But the customer usually is not aware of these complexities. They don't usually discover them until something goes wrong, and they are looking for an accountable party.
"Who is responsible for the presence of E. Coli in the hamburger meat?"
This compels the question: When you ask others to do your Marketing for you, as we do essentially in Affiliate Marketing, what do you owe them? What standards of conduct and disclosure are we demanding of the Sponsor programs we support with our traffic?
Even when dealing with physical goods and brick-and-mortar retail, it can prove surprisingly difficult to establish responsibility when there is a problem with something you have bought. Given no other way to convey a grievance or seek remedies, the consumer is forced to escalate and litigate. It's no wonder that many merchants have been distancing themselves from accountability to the consumer. The liabilities of responsibility to the consumer have exceeded the benefits of keeping promises made to the consumer.
This has created a trust-void.
In electronic commerce, this trust-void is simply intolerable. It is occupied by the Affiliate Networks, by Webmasters and by a few 3rd party service and infrastructure providers. It is a murky place. To make maters worse, this murkiness is protected by those who are making millions in ways they don't want you to scrutinize.
If it were left up to these unscrupulous companies and individuals, the trust-void would grow murkier, and all of electronic commerce would suffer for it.
In light of this important problem, the role of the Affiliate becomes critical. Now that bloggers and other individual operators of Web sites are turning the Internet, essentially, into an Advocacy Medium, it's going to get really easy to carve out the rot.
All Affiliates have to do is choose carefully who they send their traffic to. Support the good. Boycott the bad, by taking down your links.