Is article marketing going down the drain?

Very true - and very neatly put.

And the problem many successful article marketers have with forum threads asking whether article marketing is going down the drain is that typically the majority of their participants are using the words "article marketing" as a euphemistic abbreviation for "trying to use article directories for their own traffic and/or for their own backlinks" (i.e. something very different from what "article marketing" really means, and merely an extremely limited sort of "article marketing" which actually went down the drain a long time before the so-called "Panda update" was widely credited with pouring away all its value).

The fundamental question typically left unaddressed in such discussions is whether one wants a potential customer (who finds an article by inputting one of its keywords into a search engine as his search terms) to find the article in an article directory or on one's own site.

It's a question which (once asked) we can all answer for ourselves.

For myself, I have typically about a 20% click-through rate from an article directory to my own site, or - to express that in simple English rather than in marketing jargon - I lose 80% of those people before they ever get to my site, so for me it's a very easy question to answer.

I have about 1,350 articles in Ezine Articles (all of which were originally published and indexed on one of my own sites prior to submission there), and the last thing I'd want is for a potential customer to find those copies rather than the ones on my own sites (which - thankfully, by very easily arranging it that way - are the ones he'll actually find). I'm submitting them all to EZA to be found there by all the people (webmasters, ezine publishers, newsletter compilers) using EZA as a directory, i.e. searching there (not in Google) for content to syndicate. A directory is "where you look stuff up". Luckily for me, those people tend to know that that's why article directories exist and that's the demand they were created to supply.

The same thing I've always done: article marketing rather than article directory marketing. The "Panda update" has been very kind to article marketers, as so many of us have been saying here for a few months, now. With all those article directories swept off the front page of Google's SERP's it's getting easier all the time for us to rank the articles on our own sites.

Google isn't "discounting article marketing" at all. It's just found a way to repress the SEO value of article directories. Many article marketers aren't using them for their own traffic or for their own backlinks, though - that's hasn't exactly been a "strong business model" for a long time.