A look at Affiliate Marketing in 2016

Many domain investors have dabbled with affiliate programs in their domaining career as a way to make some money with a mini site or blog. I have to say I have not done much with affiliate programs over the last couple years except for some Uniregistry stuff.

It seems now that some larger publishers like Gawker Media are focusing more on affiliate programs as ad blocking grows and Adsense seems to be paying out less. There is an excellent article on what affiliate marketing looks like in 2016 written by Rae Hoffman on Marketing Land.

If you have been doing affiliate marketing or thinking about starting the article is well worth the read, Rae really knows her stuff and has been doing it for a long time.

From the article:

As affiliate marketing emerges as a viable native advertising alternative for traditionally display-funded larger publishers, the competition in obtaining affiliate sales will increase. The challengers for affiliate marketing revenue will be stronger in terms of technology and resources.

The bar for what kind of sales volume allows you to negotiate higher commissions from merchants will likely be raised.

But amid the cons, we also stand to see some positive effects on the industry. The adoption of affiliate marketing by larger publishers could help increase the level of acceptance of affiliate monetization models by users as encountering affiliate disclaimers becomes a more regular occurrence.

Larger publishers with more substantial budgets also are positioned to be able to promote innovations that smaller publishers can replicate.

Read the full story and bookmark it here