I personally don’t see why a “posh do” adds any more credibility to something – stick a pig in a suit and it still grunts – however if business is still so shallow as to discriminate good from bad by how corporate one person is from another then that’s a pretty sad day for AM imo.

Jason

Reminds me of a Taoist quote

“The only thing that doesn’t change, is change itself”.

I think you and I have been around for such a long time, we know what change is and we have always managed to deal with it, converting from CPM to CPA all them years ago was bloody hard but then it turned out CPA was not so bad accept for the Networks making a mint from the spyware scum, but we sorted them out and it stopped in the UK, yes some still try it on but it’s not as bad as it could have been. However now we are faced with new challenges to overcome. I have been thinking that “professionalism” is just another way for taking money from folk and pretending everything they do smells of roses, don’t question the hand that’s feeding you type of thing.

I have always looked at people I meet as potential friends but sadly it seems more are interested in what they can make from “being my friend” than actually being a friend. It’s a weird industry alright and I know who my real friends are and I am pleased to have made such good long standing friends like yourself back when we where not apparently “professional” or at least that’s what we are being force to believe as each week passes. It’s weird how most of these people are the ones that talk about, move and shape the industry, so unprofessional of them to have blogs and actually challenge things.

Change is going to happen but please don’t parcel up rubbish changes and hide the truth about shocking things that go on just to look “professional”, that will be the death of what this industry is actually about.

I guess in a marketing industry like this it was only time before we had to start making up our own BS, then say it over and over and hope people believe it’s true and for some people they have even started to believe their own hype, I guess when you have networks lying to people so much that you start to think it’s true, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the industry followed suit.

So speak out, stand up, challenge big network (and the small ones) root out the merchants that couldn’t give a flying (insert your own swear word here) about giving you a bad deal and don’t forget the Affiliate that’s out for himself and is doing everything underhand to get it, make these people a target, it’s the only professional thing to do

Perhaps it has a lot to do with the fact that many affiliates aren’t generally sitting on a computer in their bedrooms anymore and have the pressures of staff and office space and affiliate programs and managers are now heavily driven by targets and their bottom line (this wasn’t always the case).

My opinion is that the main advantages that affiliates have over the companies they promote is that they are smaller and much more dynamic operations that can react to change a lot faster. With that comes a need for LESS professionalism in many ways, otherwise tons of affiliates would not survive.

All of that being said, I have made many more great friendships with other affiliates recently but they are certainly different to the ones I made 10 years ago.