Fred Wilson (AVC) wrote a thought provoking piece the other day about how affiliate marketing undervalues the link.
So, in two days, that blog post generated 535 views of the Amazon page and 40 purchases. The affiliate fees associated with those 40 purchases add up to $6.50.
But those 535 views are pretty valuable. Those 535 clicks translated into a total of 118 orders in the past two days, including a Kindle. The total affiliate fees associated with those 535 clicks were $25.20.
But even including all the commerce that was generated from that link, that $25.20 is a cost per click of roughly 5 cents. I think that’s low for a bunch of reasons.
The post inspired some interesting conversation around how in a perfect world, each player in the chain of purchasing-intent generating events e.g blogs, social media pundits all the way to affiliate marketers should be compensated in some way, as opposed to the way affiliate links function now, where only the last attribution is compensated.
Inspired by the post, I decided to construct my own experiment in recommendation commerce to see if I could influence anyone to buy a product through an affiliate link, answering questions on Aardvark. I decided to only present an affiliate link as an answer when it was relevant to the question being asked, and after a series of un-monetizable questions, I was presented with the following.

The book I recommended was Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior (notice affiliate code in link again).
Notice how my answer was hyper-relevant to the question being asked of me. I would guess that in any other scenario, my affiliate link given as an answer would not have been treated with such gratitude. Also of note is the added benefit of my referral, Aaron purchased another two books, sweetening my take by $1.98.

Does this form of monetization scale? Maybe. Does it make sense at such a small one-to-one level? Probably not.
Therefore, I think it remains to be seen, which model (if any) is waiting to be unearthed to monetize the value that is generated in the form of social reviews and recommendations, but it is an interesting space, and one that I will be keeping my eye on.