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Comment by joaodlf | Hacker News Reader

The world of affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. A lot of developers won't find their nirvana here, and that's understandable, but when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems.

I also believe this is an area that is still craving for real innovation and solutions. There is a lot of money to be made here, but no one has really "cracked" it yet, not truly.

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> when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems

This is how a lot of people justify working on some pretty awful things :(

Sure, but Affiliate Marketing is just marketing. It's not the best thing in the world, but it sure as hell isn't worse than the likes of Facebook, Google, etc.

Why should it be one or the other? Let’s just do away with both.

It’s like a criminal justifying his actions with “well at least it isn’t murder so I’ll keep going”.

That's not what I am saying. Any large web platform will use these tactics, the worst offenders being the ones on top of the chain. Even if you truly believe your platform or employer does not use these tactics, they are being positively affected by the platforms that do. Your work more than likely contributes to this massive market - and it is massive, it pays a lot of wages, directly and indirectly.

That's again like saying, "I'm technically in the mafia, but I work the small jobs that don't involve threatening or killing people, so this is OK".

> isn't worse than the likes of Facebook, Google, etc.

I didn't qualify my statement to leave these out…

When I read these sentiments, I usually see it as people that naively believe the "badness" of the internet is limited to a selected list of players. If we could magically get rid of these players, you might as well shut down the whole internet.

The internet, sadly, still runs due to these shady platforms. Without them, businesses wouldn't sell enough, "good sites" wouldn't have a revenue model, people that falsely believe their work is ethical and good wouldn't be paid.

The solution is not to purge, but to improve and clarify.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Google or Facebook, and they clearly provide value to many people. It's their methods I have issue with, and you're right: if they could improve them I might not feel that they were doing wrong anymore. They haven't yet, though…

I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver?

There seems to be little legitimate money to be made and it mostly hinges on tricks & dark patterns to mislead customers into bad deals as far as they’re concerned.

> I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver?

For most pages, I'd say very little to the customer, a lot to the merchant: the merchant can't claim things about the product for legal reasons, can't make up fake reviews/testimonials etc, so they outsource that task to the affiliate. Of course, they don't say "just claim some bullshit", but they accept that it's done, and it will be done because there's a lot of incentive to do it and none to not do it.

What I'm really surprised with is the whole couponing sector of affiliate marketing. It doesn't provide any value to the merchant, because people typically look for coupons after they've decided to buy something at a specific store. You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.

> You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.

It's price segmentation. There's lots of people who will not buy some types of stuff unless they can find a deal. Coupons let you profit off those people, sometimes enough to make it worth to pay a middleman to take care of the work involved in distributing them.

Sure, but you don't need the middleman. You can (and some large shops do) just publish the deals yourself. Add a /coupon/ or /voucher/ page or whatever the local term is and put your deals there. You'll rank for it, people looking for a deal will find it and use the "no shipping" or "5% off for new customers" deal you provide. Same effect, only you don't pay 1-10% to some affiliate publisher that has lots of incentive to damage your brand by advertising coupons that don't exist etc because the he only needs the click to get paid, leading to additional support and annoyed customers. I just don't see the added value that an affiliate publisher generates.

You almost never need a middleman. But companies, especially smaller ones, are limited for time and attention. Someone comes in and tells you they can do a service X for you that'll cost you Y and net you Z, Y < Z, many companies will jump at it - Y is still much less than it'd cost them to run X themselves (hiring people, figuring out how to do it effectively, etc.).

That it later turns out that the deal was bad for the company long-term - well, that's the reality of business. Plenty of dishonest and exploitative companies exist and are successful.

Sure, but freeing resources is something that I do consider a value. In this case, you still need to handle coupon codes, you need to create those coupons, you need to transmit those coupons to affiliates - the only thing you don't need to do is publish them on your own page.

It may be that some consultant talks shops into it, I just never understood what the value proposition is. "Look, just pay somebody 5% of your revenue and deal with annoyed customers instead of spending an hour on this once" doesn't sound that attractive.

It connects consumers with products and services they might otherwise not have been made aware of, and pays the content producers' bills

Sure, a lot of that content is bullshitters bullshitting about bullshit products and in the MLM world some of the bullshit "products" consist solely of instructions on how to make more affiliate links, but affiliate marketing is also how most price/feature comparison sites which are actually useful make their money, and started off as a way of getting people to take writing book reviews more seriously because they could earn a bit from linking interested readers directly to a purchase page on a new website called Amazon.

> you get to solve some really interesting problems

Like what? Attribution and customer journey?

Aka stalking. No thanks, I’ll work on more ethical things.

There is not a single large web platform that does not use complex tracking and targeting mechanisms.

Affiliate Marketing is nothing compared to that.

Better not work for large web platforms then.

I don’t and still manage to earn good money contracting for honest businesses (that have a real product/service that people pay for instead of relying on stalking to make money).

There’s plenty of stuff out there beyond FAANG.

Why do you include Apple, Amazon & Netflix in your list?

My point was less to show their lack of ethics and more that there’s more than enough money to be made in small (but profitable) businesses.

Amazon is involved in advertising though so it’s just a matter of time before that cancer consumes the entire company (in addition to being unethical overall like closing their eyes on the counterfeit problem).

Better not work for the web at all, if that's what worries HN users.

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