It's that time of year, already a month into 2015, and still haven't made enough to take the rest of the year off, so I'll make some completely biased and unfounded predictions for how the next 11 months will unfold. Feel free to check back 12/31 and tell me how wrong I was, or better yet, add your own predictions for the industry this year.
1) Diet CPA Offers will see a drop. No new Oz effect on any magic berries, garcinia will continue to be saturated, while merchant accounts will die off more rapidly for trial offers in the space (Pacnet, Evo, USMS, etc are all pulling back on new stuff, older ones are seeing the wrath of Mastercard, Chargeback ratio rules are getting rough, and bank underwriters have gotten a lot more careful). It's about to get a lot harder for new trials to pop up, and that's good for the older guys, but bad for overall market growth.
Straight-sale diet will see more stability because there will always be a market for diet products. Some free trial guys that are established will make it, but you'll see a lot less "me too" new offers flooding in and trying to divide up the pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Payout will decrease as the established guys no longer have to fight off the 200 new garcinia/yacon/acai/whatever advertisers that can no longer get MIDs. If you want to make money and not get burned as a diet affiliate, look to more established guys (maybe even, gasp, straight-sale revshare ones) that have aged MIDs and know what they are doing, vs brand new ones promising larger CPA upfront but can't scale and will be gone in 2 months.
2) At least one "known" Network will go under in 2015, if not more, leaving some affs stiffed on payments. No, I don't know who. Make sure you know who you are doing business with. Networks can add a lot of value (yes, I'm biased) in terms of offsetting your finance risk and skyrocketing your scaling ability (both for Advertisers and Affs) in the current environment, but they can also be bad at evaluating their own credit risk and exposure. When it comes down to covering their bad bets with the owner's personal net worth vs the payments due to the affs, guess who's going to see the loss? Know your partners bros.
3) SEO is still a $$$-maker - tired of hearing all the "seo is dead bros" talk lately?, me too. SEO is a zero-sum game, meaning just because 5 guys who's biz model was based on crappy web 2.0 linkwheels and scrapebox spam fell out of the Top 5 spots, doesn't mean 5 other sites ranked by guys who adapted didnt take their place. There's guys on WF who know their SEO and can rank, they just are more careful about releasing their methods to the masses on b/s/t for a short-term gain that immediately gets outed and copied by the digitalpoint crowd. Buying the cheapest package you can find on b/s/t to point at your wordpress site about tomatoes and expecting instant zillions might not be effective anymore, find the guys who've been around here talking about SEO for more than 4 months, odds are they are the ones that can adapt. Join the new 5 SERPs, not the old 5. As always, PM grindstone for all the secretz.
4) Lead Gen is getting hawt - big brands like lead gen. New players with VC money like lead gen. Established businesses with a long-term business plan that isn't reliant on tomorrow's credit card deposits like lead gen. Best of all, you can "sell" to customers who don't have to give a credit card payment to the merchant for you to get paid as the aff. 99% of Facebook's "customers" never gave them a credit card or paid them a dime, yet look how valuable those customers are to FB, they just make the money off them indirectly, that's basically the same premise as some of the growing lead gen stuff out there. Don't limit yourself to thinking the only way you can get paid by a Merchant is only by referring customers to their "Order Now" checkout pages.
5) PPC/old-school media buys will come back in style - After everybody got so excited about Facebook and mobile stuff, a lot of the "old" methods of online advertising became less relevant, and now those companies have to work harder to get back the traffic that used to line up begging to give them money. I feel like it's 2008 again, with my Adwords accounts running, and actually spending money on Yaho and Bing again, don't forget about the traffic sources that "used to work" before everybody got excited about Facebook, a lot of them have improved now because they had to to compete.
good luck bros, 2015 will separate those who have real business models from those in the space who can only copy others while watching the ice melt under their feet.
1) Diet CPA Offers will see a drop. No new Oz effect on any magic berries, garcinia will continue to be saturated, while merchant accounts will die off more rapidly for trial offers in the space (Pacnet, Evo, USMS, etc are all pulling back on new stuff, older ones are seeing the wrath of Mastercard, Chargeback ratio rules are getting rough, and bank underwriters have gotten a lot more careful). It's about to get a lot harder for new trials to pop up, and that's good for the older guys, but bad for overall market growth.
Straight-sale diet will see more stability because there will always be a market for diet products. Some free trial guys that are established will make it, but you'll see a lot less "me too" new offers flooding in and trying to divide up the pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Payout will decrease as the established guys no longer have to fight off the 200 new garcinia/yacon/acai/whatever advertisers that can no longer get MIDs. If you want to make money and not get burned as a diet affiliate, look to more established guys (maybe even, gasp, straight-sale revshare ones) that have aged MIDs and know what they are doing, vs brand new ones promising larger CPA upfront but can't scale and will be gone in 2 months.
2) At least one "known" Network will go under in 2015, if not more, leaving some affs stiffed on payments. No, I don't know who. Make sure you know who you are doing business with. Networks can add a lot of value (yes, I'm biased) in terms of offsetting your finance risk and skyrocketing your scaling ability (both for Advertisers and Affs) in the current environment, but they can also be bad at evaluating their own credit risk and exposure. When it comes down to covering their bad bets with the owner's personal net worth vs the payments due to the affs, guess who's going to see the loss? Know your partners bros.
3) SEO is still a $$$-maker - tired of hearing all the "seo is dead bros" talk lately?, me too. SEO is a zero-sum game, meaning just because 5 guys who's biz model was based on crappy web 2.0 linkwheels and scrapebox spam fell out of the Top 5 spots, doesn't mean 5 other sites ranked by guys who adapted didnt take their place. There's guys on WF who know their SEO and can rank, they just are more careful about releasing their methods to the masses on b/s/t for a short-term gain that immediately gets outed and copied by the digitalpoint crowd. Buying the cheapest package you can find on b/s/t to point at your wordpress site about tomatoes and expecting instant zillions might not be effective anymore, find the guys who've been around here talking about SEO for more than 4 months, odds are they are the ones that can adapt. Join the new 5 SERPs, not the old 5. As always, PM grindstone for all the secretz.
4) Lead Gen is getting hawt - big brands like lead gen. New players with VC money like lead gen. Established businesses with a long-term business plan that isn't reliant on tomorrow's credit card deposits like lead gen. Best of all, you can "sell" to customers who don't have to give a credit card payment to the merchant for you to get paid as the aff. 99% of Facebook's "customers" never gave them a credit card or paid them a dime, yet look how valuable those customers are to FB, they just make the money off them indirectly, that's basically the same premise as some of the growing lead gen stuff out there. Don't limit yourself to thinking the only way you can get paid by a Merchant is only by referring customers to their "Order Now" checkout pages.
5) PPC/old-school media buys will come back in style - After everybody got so excited about Facebook and mobile stuff, a lot of the "old" methods of online advertising became less relevant, and now those companies have to work harder to get back the traffic that used to line up begging to give them money. I feel like it's 2008 again, with my Adwords accounts running, and actually spending money on Yaho and Bing again, don't forget about the traffic sources that "used to work" before everybody got excited about Facebook, a lot of them have improved now because they had to to compete.
good luck bros, 2015 will separate those who have real business models from those in the space who can only copy others while watching the ice melt under their feet.
