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Jan 03
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The issue (and systemic error) is that content providers, influencers, and pre-sales are not getting fairly compensated for purchases that they ultimately contributed to. The value of influence versus sales needs to be stripped down to it’s barest essentials and measured.
Background for this post:
- Chris Dixon: Why content sites are getting ripped off
- Fred Wilson: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Link
- Jonathan Mendez: The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising
Chris, Fred and Jonathan have spent some cycles digging into what I see now as a great opportunity for market disruption. Advertising as we know it is about to go through a pretty heavy shift. But it’s not only advertising which is about to flip, it’s also manufacturing, online stores, warehouses, drop shippers, customer service, and sales.
Here’s the revolution I see brewing in the relation between the Net, manufacturing, storing/delivery, and sales:
I can smell the opportunity. We need to shift the system so that the problem is reframed.
1) As a content creator and affiliate you would like to be compensated for downstream purchase actions directly or indirectly related to your link and commentary
2) Those downstream (as Liad stated below) have no financial incentive to change the status quo
3) To improve the analysis of downstream actions, whether they happen a day later or a few months later, real time data needs to be collected from sites/services which opt in to a Universal Tracker (protocol/standard).
4) Simple statistical models that correlate user purchase actions with multiple relevant product referrals can fairly distribute affiliate revenue.
5) Fully decoupled manufacturing processes from single brand drop shipping (Amazon and other big online brands, are ripe for disruption), will allow the market to fairly assess the value of an affiliate sale.
6) Quantization of sales influence, versus the various steps of design, manufacture, product warehousing, drop shipping, or other segments of product to consumer flow will be optimally rewarded to benefit not only the consumer, but all parties involved.
The preceding comments from AVC (my favorite blog hangout for a good reason).
