It’s been 269 days since CostPerNews launched on October 31, 2006 and this is the 600th post. There are over 2,700 comments scattered around the site’s posts, which isn’t too bad for a niche blog that frequently suffers from illusionary flights of fancy and early adopterism.

In the six months that CostPerNews has been alive, affiliate marketing has changed very little while the rest of the online marketing world has undergone tremendous upheavals.  Google bought DoubleClick, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo all followed suit.  Facebook became the messiah platform and unleashed it’s marketplace and widget platform. Widgets in general continue to see adoption. Video has exploded and is being indexed in the Google serps at increasingly higher positions. Google has begun its expected (and hoped for) crackdown on MFA sites and thin affiliate sites. Marketing by communication continues to morph on platforms like Twitter.

The news and innovations from the world of affiliate marketing trickle in at a much slower pace. ShareASale released its widget platform, CJ (finally) made RSS feeds available for news and new merchants updates, Linkshare (sorta) opened its web services. A few bloggers with a focus on affiliate marketing are implementing video. Companies like Tumri are investing heavily in widgets.  There is some innovation and forward progress occurring in affiliate marketing.

However, as we head into the Affiliate Summit in Miami next month, we still aren’t pushing ahead as an industry. We’re stuck in discussions on how to pay the least amount for traffic that we’d like to send to our thin affiliate sites or how to find generic content that will lead to the most viewers through search. Improving on tactics is a necessary part of any industry, but let’s not forget the innovation part as well.

This isn’t a chicken little post about the impending doom of affiliate marketing. If you’ve read this blog or heard me on podcasts, etc you know that I think that mode of arm chair punditry is downright silly and/or ignorant.  However, what we do in this industry defines its character.  From my point of view, most of the blogs I’m finding that cover affiliate marketing are focused on tactics (many of them shady) rather than covering trends, developments or innovations.  Those types of blogs are out there, but they seem to be fewer further between every month.

So, here’s to another 6 months of blogging and CostPerNews, and here’s to a 6 months of realized innovation.  Perhaps Affiliate Summit will be the catalyst for a run of progress and forward thinking in our industry and 6 months from now, we’ll all be looking back and trying to catch our breathes.

We’ll see…