Sometime's I wish I started affiliate marketing 15 years ago...It looks like more and more regulation are popping from nowhere and before I just read something about higher taxes in the united states for online retailers...

Yes affiliate marketing is a losing game. No wonder most affiliates now hardly make a sale every 200 - 300 clicks or so

The cookies aspect is not too troubling to me. Someone will find an alternate tracking system. The American "no track, no how" bill, on the other hand, seems much farther reaching, and more likely to affect as as affiliate marketers. What happened to the "land of the free"? Now some politician can stand up at reelection time next year and show how they are protecting the voter's privacy from those evil, online marketers.

Hopefully, the larger companies that rely more on affiliate marketing for a nice chunk of their revenue Or some other enterprising, (and brilliant) individual will find a way to track without tracking as we know it. Is it possible that this time, the sky really is falling?

There will always be a way to get out of this. The best that comes to my mind is building a relationship with your list.

I see another problem coming with these: more people will go into product creation because that way they would lose less sales than with affiliate marketing. The quantity of products will probably decrease the quality.

We have to wait...

News flash:

There were affiliate marketers before there were browser cookies.

Cooking systems are old anyway. There are other ways to track, IP tracking is one of them.

That is almost impossible to block (You need to be behind some sort of proxy), and if they click on a link and get their IP tracked, I'm not sure how the government will block that. Nothing is stored on their computer.

In any event, if the law gets passed in America - it isn't just affiliate marketing that could be hurt. Tracking permeates everything we do - conversion rates, ctr's, email sign ups, time on site, etc. etc.

Think about this - if we were no longer allowed to track anything, a lot of marketing tactics would become useless or not profitable (like PPC).

With this I'm not entirely sure we have much to worry about. This will affect a lot more than just Amazon - most companies that do online selling track and you can bet they ALL will be fighting it.

Rob

Danny DeVito's character, "Larry the Liquidator", said it best in the movie, "Other People's Money"...

"They can change the rules, but they can't take away the game."

Just because the bill is before the US congress it doesn't mean it's actually going to get passed. It's probably one of the most disfunctional organizations in the world and somebody will tack on some pork barrel spending amendment and kill the bill.

^^ what she said... plus, a sobering reading about your non-existent privacy on the web
Data Mining: How Companies Know Your Personal Information - TIME

Stop relying on cookies and long-term effects.

When you get a user's attention on an affiliate product, you want him to buy NOW. Not tomorrow, when you'll still get your commission because of a cookie. NOW.

You know how we talk about "buying keywords," and not wasting our time selling to people who are still in the research phase?

Same thing. We just want higher confidence that the buyer is about to buy. The market window just shrank; competition will go up. You want everyone who hits your aff link to buy within twenty minutes.

This will change the kind of traffic you pursue, and probably the ways you try to capture it.

Now, that said, keep this in mind.

Most affiliate cookies don't actually do any kind of tracking.

See, my affiliate systems never track the cookie. The cookie tracks the affiliate, but I don't pay any attention to the cookie until the "buy" button gets hit. So these regulations don't affect my affiliate cookies. They can still work exactly the same as they always have.

But they still get deleted when cookies get cleared.

So the industry itself isn't going to change. Not on my end. My affiliate programs will still work the same, my cookies will still last as long, my products will still have the same commission rates.

What's going to change is the customer behaviour. More customers will be clearing their cookies, so you're not going to be able to rely on that cookie anymore.

Me? I don't care. I don't promote stuff as an affiliate and expect that my cookie will get me commissions days or weeks down the line. I promote in the expectation that I will make sales and commissions now, and anything that happens later is just a nice bonus. Likewise, I expect that when people buy my products, they'll do it through an affiliate who gets a commission... and when they don't, it's a nice bonus.

So my world doesn't change. I just make a little less money as an affiliate, and a little more money as a vendor. Okay, a lot more money as a vendor, on a per-sale basis.

Verdict?

Be a vendor.

Does this mean the sky is falling? Probably for some people...

I never delete cookies. Or else, I would have to remember the login info for all the sites that I visit. :p