Written by Brook Schaaf

First, a huge thank you to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on my forthcoming book. I couldn’t have asked for a better turnout, especially not one with more seasoned, thoughtful affiliate marketers with great engagement. The book is shaping up with four main topics: 

  • a short background on the online advertising ecosystem, including attribution
  • affiliate marketing mechanics, including types and examples
  • a criticism of walled gardens and open-web programmatic: that the former elicits spend past the point of diminishing returns whereas the latter may not even get there
  • an argument that affiliate marketing can and should and will be much bigger in the future. 

Each of the selected polls below had 49 respondents on average and is, I think, reasonably representative of industry attitudes (rephrased and abbreviated for clarity; percentages rounded to the nearest decimal):

Is affiliate better considered a channel or a means of payment? Channel 85%. Means of payment 15%. 

Affiliate marketing is in competition with other channels for budget. 86% Agree or Strongly Agree. 0% Strongly Disagree.

Do you agree with the logic that affiliate is undersized relative to the current value it creates? 87% Agree or Strongly Agree. 0% Disagree or Strongly Disagree. 

Do you agree that affiliate does “not have a seat at the table” and that it does not have the level of awareness that it should? 80% Agree or Strongly Agree. 18% Neutral. 2% Disagree. 

Does the larger online advertising ecosystem have a balanced or unfair attitude toward affiliate marketing? 72% Unfairly negative against affiliate. 23% Neutral. 6% Unfairly positive toward affiliate. 

Do you think that affiliate overall is generally under-credited or, conversely, over-credited? 63% Under or grossly under-credited. 27% Neutral. 10% Over or grossly over-credited (Echo of the prior results).

Affiliate marketers should mount some kind of campaign to draw attention to the shortcomings of other channels? 43% Agree or Strongly Agree. 25% Neutral. 12% Disagree or Strongly Disagree.

Setting aside natural growth, the affiliate channel could be larger. Yes – up to twice as big: 43%. Yes – multiples larger: 51%. No – already larger than it should be: 2%. No, about the right size already: 4%. 

So we end on a high note, that there is a sense of great possibility if perhaps not optimism for the growth of the affiliate channel, presumably in part justified by earlier questions that the channel (coupon and commerce and everything else considered) is under-credited and under-represented or understood. If and how we campaign against this remains to be seen.

There was not space in today’s blurb for other topics and questions but I shall return to them in due course. Thank you again to everyone who joined. 

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