Roy: The Wild West of Affiliate Marketing

Mark and I just came back from the Ad:Tech Conference in San Francisco. Were any of you there? Share your impressions if you were.

If you have not been to this conference and you are in the business of marketing through the internet, I highly recommend that you attend it next time. You can check out their website at:

http://www.ad-tech.com/

We are partnering with another company to launch our affiliate marketing campaign, and so we paid them a visit at the conference. Three days and my head was spinning. The place was certainly full of energy, ideas and innovative young business people. I must confess that I felt like a bit of an old-timer at times.

Obviously, there are people and companies making money in the affiliate marketing space. That is clearly the primary objective. And that drive for profit is bringing out a tremendous amount of creativity, but there was something missing. I have seen the development of these kinds of market niches before, and through all the excitement, I picked up on something that I have seen in the past. This space is ripe for a major player to come in and bring corporate structure to it. If I were a betting man, I would bet that that will happen within the next year or two. I don’t know who it will be – big ad agencies looking for new growth areas, perhaps – but my gut tells me it’s going to happen.

Share your hunches if you have them, or disagree with me if you think I’m nuts. Either way, we’re going along for the ride.