This is just my take on things as a long time affiliate in other niches and the changes I’ve seen happen over the years.
Years ago when affiliates knew how to rank sites in a Goog search engine that wasn’t diluted full of their own self serving ads, we controlled the traffic and the AMs knew it. They had to work with us and keep us sweet or they didn’t get a slice of OUR pies!
Since Goog shook up its algo and went all out war against affiliates, the balance of power has shifted away from us and into the laps of the operators. Just look at the SERPs for most of the major, high traffic terms and where once affiliate sites dominated, its now mostly operators.
Now the ops have more power and we have less control of the traffic, they can change their TOS to suit themselves and thumb their noses at us because they can. Maybe it won’t last, but for now, there’s no getting away from teh fact that Goog controls almost ALL the traffic and it gets to say who plays in its playpen and who goes to the naughty step.
Right now, it likes the Brands, so they get to play. With their own free traffic, they don’t need us so much. They have the power. When you have the power, you call the shots. You know, like in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. power corrupts. So we are seeing more of this power thing happening and the affiliates are suffering with income way down and less leverage because we don’t control the traffic like we used to.
The solution is simple, but likely unachievable because we can’t make Goog change.
The idea of uniting against the common enemy is a rousing concept and fires up the motivation. I love the sentiment, but reality makes its painful slap round the back of the head – and that reality is we can’t fight something as big and as deeply entrenched as Google. Without the traffic it supplies, even in unison we haven’t got the leverage to stand up to the big brands doing whatever they like to their terms.
I remember seeing this happen with eBay a few years ago when they started kicking out all their highest earning affiliates, while making crazy changes to their terms for existing affiliates, because they thought they could work without them. Amazon are heading that way too, because they own most of the Goog serps for any keywords that are worth having, so why pay affiliates a cut when they can keep it all to themselves?
Until Goog gets tired of that particular toy and decides to give someone else a go.
…ok I’m starting to ramble on a bit.
Point is, I totally agree with you ironman2000 that we should try and work together more closely, while at the same time I can see the futility of it if things don’t improve from outside our sphere of control. My 2 cents, anyway.