Forum Moderators: skibum
Affiliates are ruining the internet.
Spam sites are bad, affiliate sites are good.
Without affiliates, when you were looking to buy something, you'd find, more of less, the manufactors page. You'd have to search through each page and do your own research, not to mention not being able to find some of the sites due to poor SERPs. With the rise of CPA, I've now seen an amazing number of _useful_ reviewing, catagorizing, informational affiliate sites.
You take the bad with the good.
If there were no affiliate programs, whats next? Why don't we get rid of PPC results, because that just ties a customer to a targeted merchant, no need for that. They are annoying, get in the way, and who wants these companies to actually make money anyway? Staying in business is overrated. In fact, why don't we just get rid of banners and text ads all together, webmaster's don't actually do any _work_ on their site, and don't need to pay for hosting or bandwidth or anything silly like that.
Your internet is a sad world filled with personal homepages and frames. But, your opinion is noted.
Generally when people site an argument, they like to back it up with examples and facts. I could understand if you were looking for a specific item and were bombarded by useless spam sites, but a professional webmaster forum isn't the place to blow off steam.
I am so sick of the spam out there, all the time I get pushed to buy one product or another. Often I see the same website coming out of numerous addresses.
Affiliates are ruining the internet.
You could easily say just the opposite, that consumers are ruining the internet. If there are no buyers from spam, there would be no spammers.
That's the main argument in the pro-affiliate side of things. People are obviously finding what they are looking for, or they wouldn't be buying it. Therefore it's a service and not an annoyance.
If they banned affiliates - there would be no pages left to be in the search engines. lol!
I assume you mean that aff sites are ruining the search engines. Keep in mind that Google and yahoo both run massive affiliate programs (adsense and Overture partners) - by far the biggest on the web in terms of pages other than Amazon
