Death to Affiliate Marketing?? Do Tell.

MSN NBC ask the question Death to Affiliate Marketing??

According to Rick Aristotle Munarriz of The Motley Fool.com that is. But I'm not so sure that I agree with his assessment. He says that due to the difference in stock prices between Google and affiliate networks like DoubleClick and Fastclick it is a done deal.

Well what about affiliates that are not part of a network, like Amazon and eBay (two big players in affiliate marketing I might add). They are going to be hurting too, says Mr. Munarriz. His question is why would anyone put up a banner ad, when they can put up ads for Google.

How about;

1. The Google relevance problems. Ads do not match your content.
2. You have an image intensive site that does not have a lot of text for the googlebots to read.
3. You notice that almost every site you go to these days has ads by google.
4. If banner ads are so bad, why did Google recently start delivering banner ads?
5. Not all affiliates use banner ads.

I could go on, but I think you will get some insight from reading the article and making your own list of reasons why Affiliate marketing is alive and well.