The keynote address yesterday at Affiliate Summit West 2008 was delivered by the outspoken and usually controversial Jason Calacanis.
His engaging presentation that seemed to focus primarily on what’s bad about the affiliate marketing industry elicited strong reactions from many of the hundreds of affiliate marketers in attendance.
You can get more in-depth sound bites from some other folks who gave more details of the presentation, like Sam at Revenews. But his basic message is that Internet Marketers are pissing in the well, polluting our rivers, overfishing our oceans, insert your own tragedy of the commons metaphor here.
While he delivered his message it in a way that shouldn’t have surprised anyone, I am glad he did it.
To those of you who took offense to what Jason said, I say grow some skin and really think about what this guy is saying. Would you really rather have someone here telling us all how awesome we are while blowing smoke up our collective asses?
News flash. There ARE internet marketers out there who are making a mess of the Internet.
It doesn’t matter if Jason gets it or not. It doesn’t matter if you think what you do is “affiliate spam” or not. It doesn’t matter if he insulted our boy Zac. (Zac will be just fine).
What matters is this is what a not insignificant portion of the world outside of our little industry thinks about us.
And it’s not people that don’t matter to us. It’s the people who have control over our traffic.
For example, take a look at the past several years at all of the moves that Google and the other search engines have done to clean up this so-called mess. Look at Google’s infamous “Florida Update” which sent thousands of affiliate marketers back to square one, if not back their day jobs. Look at the many PPC rules that have been put into place to govern the bad actors.
How many of these updates have impacted you and your own affiliate marketing activities?
Do you think they looked at what was getting whacked as a whole (don’t think for a second that they didn’t take a good hard look at who got hit) and said, but look at all these great affiliate sites and said wait, we can’t hurt the good guys?
This will continue to happen as the search engines must get more and more aggressive to clean up their waters. Do you think they’ll get better and better at just cleaning out the “bad guys”? Clearly that’s a very difficult task. And instead they’ll tighten things down such that lots of what we consider good websites, useful content, services for shoppers will get sucked out with the mess.
So, in response to Jason Calacanis, yeah, get mad. But don’t get mad at him. Take a good look in the mirror.
If you’re an affiliate network, are you rewarding some of this bad behavior by allowing it to exist in your network, or worse encouraging it?
If you’re an affiliate manager, are you turning a blind eye to some tactics used by your affiliates that may be producing big, but creating a bad experience for users?
And while I don’t expect the “quick-buck-seeking, criminal mindset, marketers” as Jason affectionately labeled them to read this and say, “yeah!”, as someone who is building good stuff, consider what the world would look like if the still somewhat open resources like organic search and PPC got replaced with sites like Jason’s walled garden because the “curated web” is a nicer place to live for Grandma and Aunt Gertie.
And every time you see a PPC advertiser beating out your good ads and driving up your prices with some sneaky tactic, think about this keynote.
Every time your minimum bids get jacked up or your ads get deactivated for “quality issues”, think about this keynote.
Every time you look at a search result page and wonder why the hell that crappy site got ranked above yours, think about this keynote presentation.
Nobody can define a broad definition “good user experience”. We affiliate marketers can argue with each other about whether it was an iceburg or a torpedo that put the hole in a sinking ship instead of looking at the water pouring in and figuring out what to do about it.
That’s not to say that the Affiliate Marketing Ship is sinking, I’m not at all that fatalistic about it. But I think we all can make a pretty good educated guess as to what the companies who control the search engine results feel about what we do while painting our world with their broad brush strokes. There are surely some torpedoes all set for deployment.
And if you have a hard time with that exercise, Jason gave us a pretty good view into that mindset. People like Jason are the ones deciding whether your websites and your marketing is seen in their search engine / directory / advertising platform.
This runner up for the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle “Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award” is glad someone has the balls to stand up in front of us and point out the elephant in the room.
