Affiliate Marketing: A Better Alternative?

I was on a panel, Affiliate Marketing: A Better Alternative?, last Thursday at Content Revenue Strategies, a conference that was co-located with ad:tech New York.

The moderator was Steve Schaffer, Founder and CEO of Offers.com, and the panelists were as follows:

• Will Martin-Gill, Director, eBay Partner Network
• Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust
• Shawn Collins, Affiliate, Blogger and Co-Founder, Affiliate Summit
• Brook Schaaf, Affiliate and CEO, Schaaf Consulting
• Gil Abir, VP, Corporate Partnerships, Payoneer, Inc.

The session was not recorded, but you can see the Affiliate Marketing: A Better Alternative? slides online. Here is the description from the panel:

In today’s economy, everyone is looking for new sources of revenue and new ways to grow. For mid-long tail publishers, affiliate marketing could be the perfect fit. In 2007, web proprietors paid out several billions of dollars to affiliates globally, yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg for this widely untapped medium. As the recession squeezes ad and marketing budgets, many businesses are committing more resources to performance-based programs like affiliate marketing, making this an opportune time for savvy publishers to join the game. At the same time, consumers are spending more time online researching products and pricing, growing savvy to ignoring the often questionable network ads shown to them on their favorite blogs. This leaves the door wide open for high-quality publishers to better engage and inspire trust in their customers through affiliate marketing. On this panel, experienced affiliates and advertisers will discuss the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, highlight the key areas of opportunity and offer tips and best practices to help new affiliates achieve maximum ROI.

It was a good, interactive discussion about the state of the industry, and there was lots of Q&A. I was sort of surprised by the lack of affiliates in the crowd – just a dozen or less, with the majority of folks there being focused solely on AdSense.

Although, when asked how many were working in affiliate marketing and AdSense, way more people raised their hands than when asked which were doing affiliate marketing. Either I was confused by the question, or they were.

Other than the time I was on the panel, I spent the two days of ad:tech New York at the Affiliate Summit booth.

It was great to chat with the hundreds of people that came by to learn more about Affiliate Summit or say hello. I’ll be back at the booth this week during WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas. And I’ll be on a panel called Will Performance Marketing Save the Advertising Industry? out there, too.

Anyhow, the highlight of ad:tech was most certainly last Wednesday night when a bunch of us headed to the Bronx to see the Yankees win their 27th World Series.