Jason Calacanis calls affiliate marketers spammers

Are there spammers in the affiliate space, yes, of course there are. Are there deceptive marketers in the rarefied space of Silicon Valley venture capital and big business that Mr Calacanis travels in, damn straight. There are deceptive people everywhere.

He can call affiliate marketers whatever he wants. Jason has his opinions and loves to drop bombs to get publicity. What's new?

Alan

 

According to whom?

If you check Wikipedia, you can see that they define spam as "unsolicited or undesired bulk electronic messages," which can take place in a number of places, including blog comments, email, forums, and search indexes.

 

Hmm...is Jason Calacanis that popular? It seems he really thinks his Mahalo.com is great. I even don't know about him and his websites until you started this thread..lol..Human powered search engine is just too weak and consume too much of their times compared to algorithm-based search engine like Google or other popular search engines.

His own websites are not great and unique enough so why should you listen to him? Read this:

Is he kidding or what? Most people create serious websites to make money by giving value to their visitors. But he creates this website just for reviewing each site for each keyword? Hypocrite.. And how many hours does he spend everyday just to review new sites for each keyword? Ridiculous...I see many people start to spamming mahalo after I check it out just a few minutes ago for some popular keywords (usually health related, well, i see that.) Well, this is just plain stupid (i mean, if people start using his search engine.)

Wikipedia, for example, is not always giving the fact. I love soccer and I still remember that several months ago I ever read an article about AC Milan vs. Inter Milan (two teams from Italy). In wikipedia, they talked a very wrong fact about "Milan derby", maybe because one Inter Milan fan wrote that article. yes, algorithm-based search engine is not hard to be manipulated by spam sites but human-edited websites are always easier to be manipulated.

In the end, people will judge whether your site is spam or not. If there are plenty of affiliates who earn real money by selling his affiliate product, it means people love to buy the product through his affiliate site so what's wrong about that? If you are ranked one for competitive term in search engine or if you buy a sponsored link to beat the no.1 natural listing in Google and you do not make any money at all, then you can say that your site is just spamming. But if you successfully attract people to buy your product and these visitors do not think your website is spamming them, then I don't see anything wrong with affiliate website. Anyway, even if you create very good reviews so this Jason dude doesn't call your affiliate site as a spam site, it doesn't guarantee your long term success. Internet is a very fluctuative world. Who thinks Facebook could be a competitor to MySpace if today is still year 2005? Who even know YouTube if today is still 2004? What do you call a long term success? 5 years, 10 years? Anything can happen in 5 years from now just like we never predicted any of these sites five years ago.

Personally, I think it is advertisers who spam the search engine. In almost all competitive keywords, there are always 2-3 sponsored links above natural listings and they provide nothing valuable (just selling their products). Can you call that spam sites? Oh maybe not, because they are search engines' gold mine, aren't they? But affiliate sites which rule some natural listings can be considered as spam sites because they don't share their commissions with you...yeah, what a joke. Not all PPC guys are expecting for "word of mouth" marketing after they promoted their site through search engines. In fact, most of these PPC big guys are just trying to sell their products and they get BETTER listings than natural SERPs. However, no one called them spam sites because they give money. Money to make people click their sites instead of valuable website in natural listing. Money to make you never called them spam sites.

 

I would like to know where Jason gets this from? Like you, I do extremely well and I am no spammer at all. I also have friendsthat do affiliate marketing and they have not spammed at all either. And my friends are doing well just like I am.

 

Typical of the lame ass event that is Affiliate Summit to have a speaker that states the bleeding obvious. No affiliates there anyway to hang out with, just a bunch of sorry network people and Shawn and Missy glorifiers.

 

In many cases it's simply a case of "a few bad apples" which may apply here, but sadly, the rot has infected more then just a few, so bully for you in saying what is, for the better part, seemingly true...

I agree, the majority of the "spam" I do get, on my forum, blog, and inbox, is from mostly affiliates on one type or another.

And while it may be true that MOST affiliates are not spammers, it's the spamming ones that are seen and heard most of the time. And with the spammers being the front running spokemen for such programs, it's no wonder that the general mindset against them is based on such practices.

People must keep in mind that most 'over generalizations' are based on some truth...

I do however, tip my hat to the quite ones making a modest living by NOT spamming my internet existence...

 

I agree with Jason, to a certain extent.

There's the guys who do it legitimately, then there's the guys that do affiliate marketing by spamming the shit out of every mailbox it can find, every comment box it can find, every blog, every article, every everything.

Some affiliate-guys take the utter piss.

In saying that, I'm all for seeing more people doing it legitimately - receiving traffic from search engines and adverts, not from spamming everywhere to the point where the internet will explode with cialis and casino's

Edit: I needed to include some additional information to back up my point.

My opinion, just like Jason's opinions, are like assholes, everybody's got one

 

Most intelligent people in this business know that the big 3 search engines have gotten better and better at weeding out the seo spam. Of course people still try to do it, but being in the "black hat" affiliate world is less and less effective, so anyone that is focusing on scraping or comment spamming is probably wasting their time. Building good sites/blogs with well-written content is always the best policy to generating traffic and sales.

 

I saw that you claimed you would be running an affiliate marketing conference a couple months ago, so attacking Affiliate Summit, which you did not attend, is pretty disingenuous.

Where can I see more about your conference? I'm curious to attend and witness how a non-lame event is run.

As far as Jason Calacanis as keynote, he started a conversation about a problem in the industry that hasn't been properly addressed.

Over the past week, people have been talking about it and working on solutions.

Since the issue of black hat affiliates is "bleeding obvious" to you, how do you propose it be fixed?

Actually, we had ~1000 affiliates there.

 

My proposal:

Shotguns, man, shotguns...

 

I'll be sure to let you know as soon as we announce details. Calling out Squidoo and Pay per post is pointless at best. Everyone knows about the "seo spam" out there, if people are clever enough to use sites like that to get rankings than kudos to them. The duplicate content likely won't last long, so thats their problem. Search eninges are weeding out duplication and bad content more and more, where have you been? I think you should change the name of your conference to "Spam Network Summit" since the vast majority of attendees are from 2nd and 3rd tier spam networks. Charging affiliates to attend is what's disingenuous in this senario, aren't you making enough money from your sponsors and booth? What a scam.

 

Jason was speaking to affiliate spam overall and provided a variety of examples in the visuals.

As far as where I've been, I've been noticing an increase in scraped content from my blogs and other sites that gets indexed in Google.

I'll take your word for it, since you seem to know a thing or two about spam, based on your new site, CJaffiliate.com.

Nice combination of keyword stuffing and using the Commission Junction name without permission.

I'm curious why you concealed your personal information on that site. After all, on your blog, you were proud to announce the site back on Feb 1.

You're welcome to do things differently to compete with us. Note that we've grown significantly over the past year in the number of affiliates attending, so presumably the affiliates are satisfied with their ROI.

 

When they invited him to make the keynote, what were they expecting exactly? That he wasn't going to stir the pot?

 

His speech could be said about anything else, too. Going by his thoughts, all bloggers are also spammers, all article writers, all celeb sites, etc. Most of those sites don't provide value either.

I give this as much validity as the "internet is made of tubes" conversation

 

All good...the war is on!

 

I don't give a "rat's behind" what Jason Calacanis says. He's just taking the snooty opinion that so many people do that the internet should only be used for useful original content. Well, I got news for ya, if you try to take the money-making opportunity out of the internet, then the internet will die. It's the revenue generation on the internet that provides us with so many "free" services and etc. So who cares what Jason Calacanis has to say? If I say that his speech was spam would it really matter?

 

I think you have no compassion, or even passion (except maybe to 'want mo money'). There are many sites and services out there that are alive and well without the need to make money, and even the ones that do make money most do not resort to spam.

Why would it?

 

I strongly believe there are far worse ways for newbies (for example) to start up. Ultimately it may not pay as much as having one's own product, but good experience of the mechanics of IM can be gained along the way when aff marketing.

icj

 

Yes, but even though there are some real dummies on this board, I'm pretty sure they still got what I meant. It's pretty obvious that it is unsolicited.


As for this Jason Calacanis...I and so many others have never heard of him.

And if we have, who cares.

 

And Mahalo isn't spam? They just reorganize/republish information and fill up Google's SERPS...what do affiliate marketers do? we reorganize/republish information to sell products..he just doesn't want competition