The Future for Affiliate Marketing Pt.1

We are approaching the beginning of a huge potential disruption in performance/affiliate marketing. Now, as with any disruption, there is tremendous opportunity for those that recognize the shift early, and are able to react and adapt to it.

Consider that more and more people are shifting to online/digital means to get their content, be it video content, audio content (podcasts), or written content. Advertising spending and revenue is growing for digital, but perhaps not as fast as it could be growing.

People dislike advertising. There are far too many scams and also we've persisted far too long with low quality, spammy "shotgun" style tactics. If you read the pundits, you'll frequently see discussions about how to make advertising more interesting and engaging. Sounds challenging and sounds like we have to come up with really creative and innovate ways now to get ads in front of people. Bologne! It really doesn't need to be very challenging or difficult.

The future problem faced by display advertisers, and we're just seeing hints of it now, are services like Flipboard, Instapaper, Adblock, etc., stripping out advertising from sites. People are able to easily consume content without enduring a bombardement from online ads. The display advertising world hasn't really started panicking about this yet, since these anti-ad/pro-reader services haven't hit a point of wide adoption....but these services are growing.

Of course, this doesn't even touch the point that people just don't like to click banner advertising. Here's a nice info-graphic illustrating this phenomena: http://www.getelastic.com/why-web-users-don%e2%80%99t-click-on-banner-ads-infographic/

This provides a platinum opportunity for performance marketing to provide salvation for publishers. How? Discussion, engagement, embedding. Well, I'll leave you to consider it, and I'll offer details on my ideas in a couple days.