the state of affiliates today 

the state of affiliates today

I suspect that the dismal statistics are that over 99% of the people who tried to fund a "worthwhile" project with affiliate ads failed. The majority of people who tried affiliate ads in a get rich quick scheme failed as well.

A large number of the most successful affiliates are doing rather nasty things like installing parasites on machines, email spam or search engine spam.

For example there are affiliates with massive databases of products (often the databases are horrifically inaccurate). They then create millions of garbage web pages that search engines might mistake as meaningful.

Many successful affiliates do misleading things like join a datafeed with the FIPS database to create montrous misleading web sites to catch people who do searches on a town name and a product.

To affiliates the term "content" means key word rich steams of words. There are now affiliates that just grab meaningless streams of words and make misleading pages with ads.

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There are other clever tricks. For example, if store X doesn't offer coupons, you can make a "COUPON COUPON, GET YOUR COUPON PAGE AT STORE X COUPON STORE X COUPON, COUPON" Page. It does not matter that you don't have a coupon. The keyword combo is all that matters.

A person looking for a bargaing just might end up on your page. If you load the merchant site in a 1x1 frame to set the affiliate tag. Bada bam bad-bing. You get the commission and are off to don your white leisure suit in the local lounge.

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My guess is that for every dollar made by a site trying to do something worthwhile, $3 are made by affiliates pulling stunts with misleading datafeeds, misleading text, parasite program or other practice.