[frig]

Overall there's nothing I disagree with in what you wrote.

One thing worth point out though is that affiliate marketing is a huge force-multiplier for the company selling the product, which is why it exists in the first place.

If you have software (or whatever) you're trying to sell and you don't do an affiliate program your advertising budget is basically limited to your cash on hand.

If you run an affiliate program you can potentially get other suckers to spend their resources advertising your product on speculation; you only pay those marketers who successfully make sales, and get the other advertising for free.

A cute corollary is that you have to be tracking what they do tightly enough that you can reverse engineer the successful affiliates' strategies and self-implement them.

So affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere, but outside of the inevitable outliers the economics of it are such that the major profits will be made in scammy products, and thus the bulk of successful affiliate marketers will be marketing scams or worse.