Originally Posted by TROLLENSTEIN

I thought of it as Affiliates = Content dilution. While affiliates in the past were a good idea (and probably very much needed at the time years ago) to help spread the content to get the maximum eyeballs on it and bring in traffic, they have not been required for a long time to be honest. Once the tipping point came a few years ago it made much, much more sense for programs to generate traffic in-house. Generating the traffic in-house has 2 very obvious advantages over relying on affiliates to do the leg work:

1. Greater income generated by the program (no more 50/50 splits, time/money wasting generating affiliate resources, dealing with their bitching, etc, etc).
2. Most importantly, the promotional content is controlled and can be very, very targeted. Like switching from a blunderbuss (affiliates) to a sniper rifle (in-house).

So by utilising the Tubes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc (which required less than an hour a per day to generate more traffic than ANY affiliate) the smart owners quickly realised they could bring in, via in-house, everything any affiliate could offer for zero cost to them. And, as the owners would control this traffic, it could be funneled to EXACTLY were they wanted it to go. This in turn gives you tons of lovely clear data that you can use to tweak the promo content until you nail it. So if you can do all that yourself, for zero cost and just a little bit of time, it really doesn't make much sense having affiliates at all.