I was looking over at a certain aff forum which I had not been to in ages. They were started, largely to help do damage control for cj and excuse cj's bad practices.

But anyway, I didn't realize that google had taken over doubleclick. As much crap as google has spewed and damaged sites in aff marketing, for them to take over that company is beyond................well, I don't want to be mean but what the hell were they thinking.

Only if they had taken over valueclick or cj would it have done more to set in the ultimate rot to their reputation.

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On the board Shareasale was bragging about Cyber Monday blah, blah, blah. Okay, think about it. You are shopping so you are going to go to a content site and click an ad link.......... Course a lot of affs run coupon sites and shopping comparison sites and other such type sites so maybe. I don't know.

___My Opinion____

If you have a small online store, you basically throw money away and risk your reputation by dealing with any of the aff networks. You are better off building good will by running your own program or advertising on sites that run their on program. If you are really small you are better off just dealing through amazon or ebay.

And if you run an online site with content you are better off selling your own merchandise, directly sell ads yourself, or dealing with companies that have their own in-house programs. Although amazon and ebay are sort of networks, they are different and you are more likely to have luck with them than other networks.

Regular aff networks tend to treat their customers bad in the long run and also treat their publishers bad. And don't even get me started on skimming and tracking errors.

I understand and get that in theory the aff networks could make things more easy for publishers and advertisers but in my experience, they don't. With most publishers, the publishers lose the degree of professionalism that is required for them to be treated with any level of respect by the advertiser. And of course the publishers in turn lose respect for the advertiser and instead of singing the praises of the advertisers may end up doing viral marketing against the advertiser.
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I don't really know about search engine ads on content or user interaction sites. Some people used to claim fortunes. I don't see them posting any more. And some of them keep wondering what they are doing wrong.

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If I saw newspapers talking about their increase in online revenue for Cyber Monday Week, actually month since a concentration of sales mean nothing, I'd think maybe. For an aff network to brag, it seems rather self serving.