2009: The Year In Affiliate Marketing

In 2009…

Twitter took over the world. 
If you work and/or play on the Internet, the “little blue bird that could” was all you heard about this year.  Stealing a lot of Facebook's thunder in 2009, Twitter became one of the most talked about, most loved, most hated, and most misunderstood websites ever.  From the Industry standpoint, 2009 was also a year of trying to figure out how to best monetize Twitter.  New ad networks like RevTwt and SponsoredTweets began popping up left and right, and now even big brand advertisers are starting to see the appeal.

Local Affiliate Marketing became a buzzword. 
There were more blog posts about the "gold mine" of Local Affiliate Marketing than perhaps any other Industry-related topic this year.  Although I suspect that marketers have been tinkering with it for a couple of years now, 2009 was the year that everyone started talking about it in public.  Lots of opinions were shared, case studies were performed, and questions were asked.  Despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that there is a ton of money to be made by promoting companies in your own backyard, Affiliates still find it much easier to promote offers from Networks and work purely online.

Boutique CPA Networks thrived. 
The last few years have seen several gargantuan CPA networks garnering the majority of the traffic in the Industry.  Names like Azoogle, Hydra, and CPA Empire (now Affiliate.com) dominated by the sheer volume of their offers and affiliate memberships in the thousands.  However, in 2009, we saw a handful of Affiliate-driven networks start to take a piece of the action for themselves.  The new most-trusted and most-respected networks are names like Ads4Dough, Convert2Media, and EWA.  The hands-on instruction and more selective approval process that these smaller networks can provide is a win for both parties, because Affiliates get taught how to make more money and Advertisers can count on higher lead quality with less fraudulent transactions to worry about.

The Affiliate Tax loomed large. 
No other issue has united people in the industry and helped with the formation of professional associations for the Industry like the Affiliate Tax (or the "Amazon Tax").  New York was the first state to adopt such a tax, and subsequently a large number of affiliates living in New York were kicked out of their networks and affiliate programs.  Affiliate Managers and Advertisers didn't want to spend the time and money it would take to deal with all the reporting for thousands of transactions pushed by these New York affiliates, so they simply dropped them.  The problem has become more severe as more and more States are threatening to follow New York's lead.  This will likely continue to be a hot topic well into 2010, if not well into the next decade.

eBay shot themselves in the foot. 
In October of 2009, eBay made sweeping changes to their Partner Network, one of the largest affiliate programs on the Internet.  They moved from a model where affiliates got paid a percentage of the sales that they drove through their websites and affiliate links, to a "Quality Click Pricing" model where eBay assigns an arbitrary value each day for the clicks that were driven by each affiliate.  Consequently, many affiliates' earnings fell through the floor.  On a related note, Amazon has continued to outpace eBay in traffic during the early holiday season this year.

There are too many other amazing and/or terrible things that happened in 2009 to list here, so let me wrap it up by saying this: 2009 was the year that I was finally able to start an Affiliate Network, TriFoxMedia, and it has been one heck of a ride.  Here's hoping that 2010 (and the next decade) will bring a whole lot of revenue into the pockets of Affiliates, Networks, and Advertisers alike!