I received an e-mail today from a good friend of mine asking me “whats next?” in numerous ways/areas. I was kind of weired out by the e-mail which made me feel like blogging about it. After reading the e-mail i really thought about what was next for affiliate marketing, contextual advertising, and display advertising. After starting at the wall for 30minutes i came up with 3 different conclusions (one for each vertical). It is late so I am sorry if you don’t see my greatest work but it gets the job done!
Affiliate Marketing
Being in the game for exactly a year on 5/28 (well thats when i had my first website) i have seen things come and go; ringtones and now blockbuster.com/netflix.com. Sooner or later something will stick/keep affiliate marketers busy for more than a few weeks to a month. Right now there are e-mail submits, trials, ringtones, downloads, diet deals, finance, and a million other verticals; I think that the vast selection of offers are going so start expanding some way or another due to the fact that passerby offers are becoming rarer and rarer to find. If there were to be a next big fad in offers (another passerby) i hope it has something to due with gas (oil) due to the fact that gas is soon going to be $5.00 a gallon (someone should create a “gas savings card” or something). When it comes to the over abundance of affiliate network I feel that making money with a network will not be as easy as it is now therefore some networks will eventually either sell to a bigger network or just close there doors for good. In the affiliate marketing field i think thats it hehe…
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising is fine for people like me and you but can be a pretty shi*ty thing for advertisers. When referring to contextual advertising being shi*ty for advertisers i am bringing up the vast topic of click fraud. Click fraud really brings down payouts in addition to the whole contextual industry. I feel that this will force ad networks to optimize the way they sell clicks, forcing publishers to provide IP logs or something frivolous. Another theory of mine is that Contextual and Display advertising will combine and form Contexsplay advertising which will be both cpc and cpm or something (I don’t know its just a guess)!
Display (cpm) Advertising
I feel that contextual advertising used to be great for webmasters and is slowly becoming shitty because there isn’t enough inventory to go around for publishers (in some networks such as valueclickmedia). This is a big problem therefore I think that display advertising networks need to start working together by sharing advertisers or buying/selling each others impressions. I am not going to go to in depth with display advertising because I don’t really use it as much. But; i tried
So here is my question to you; Whats next in the whole internet marketing industry?
see this as a ping to all of you Goodnight,
Harrison