We know that ONLY ONE(Either Merchant or Affiliate) will be allowed to have ONE DOMAIN name on the advertisement for ANY keyword.
So is it bad for affiliates? Not necessarily. I see huge opportunity to drive the traffic to my affiliate site at cheaper price. It would really hurt if you were doing this PPC without your own web site. But if you have a web site with all the merchants for the products/services you are promoting and if you had to pay so much because of all the affiliate competitors, now you may pay much less and get the traffic to your site (not directly to Merchants).
Well, I also thinks that the conversion may not be as good as the direct sending but hey you could pay less. So, I think you can build the brand of your own.
I haven't done much for PPC campaigns because they were expensive but now I may show up on the first page at $0.05. Excited?
