A great deal of what Jason Calacanis talked about in his keynote at Affiliate Summit was the what he feels is the sad state of the affiliate marketing industry.

He came down pretty hard on the state of the industry as a whole - the amount of spam, the mindset of affiliate marketers in general and the lack of transparency in the way products and services get promoted by affiliates.

As to be expected, it created some controversy, given that this is a conference about affiliate marketing.

I think Jason painted the industry with too broad a brush, but coming from an "outsider" it should be a bit of an eye opener for many of us - this is how a lot of people see affiliate marketing.

In reality, I suspect that he was preaching to the converted for the most part. While some people seemed to take offense at what he said, thinking he was condemning everyone in the room, I don't think that was the case. He was only condemning the people who do the things he was complaining about.

He talked about all the "thin affiliate" sites that show up in the search results. Google has tried to minimize that, but we've all probably gone looking for something recently and still wound up on some junky site built from PLR articles with a great big Adsense block above the fold.

He also talked about how a lot of useful services and websites are becoming more and more useless as they get overrun with spam. Sites like Squidoo, Digg and many others.

Jason compared this with the early days of the internet, when Usenet was one of the most vibrant communities of people sharing information on many different topics.

Once Usenet started to get overrun with spam, it became less and less useful. To the point where if you've been on the internet for less than 4 or 5 years, you may not even have heard of it before. Nobody really uses it now because of the amount of junk on it.

They've all moved on to other places to share their knowledge that are less polluted.

And this was Jason's ultimate point. If we continue to allow these crappy affiliate websites to pollute the internet, eventually we're going to reach a point where the industry will have to make some major changes or it will become another "remember the old days" conversation about things that have come and gone on the internet.

My take on this issue is that yes, there are a lot of crappy sites out there that only exist to make a buck from affiliate commissions. But I think that they will gradually become less and less effective, through the efforts of the search engines and other sites like Calacanis's Mahalo.com, which is a human edited search engine/directory.

After all, if the search engines managed to outgame these sites and get rid of them from the SERPs, they would be rendered completely ineffective. Who's going to navigate directly to www.some-long-keyword-focused-domain-name.com to find an answer to their question?

Bottom line? If you spend the time to build something worthwhile now, it might not make you the quick buck but in the long run you're going to have a site to be reckoned with.

And that leads to the final point from the keynote that I want to discuss, which is the topic of my next post.

You can read more about Jason's keynote in these posts:

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Jason Calacanis Keynote

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Calacanis Keynote Part 3 (aka Long Term Thinking)