STM Forum Releases 2019 Affiliate Marketing Report

Affiliate marketing community STM Forum has released a new report entitled “What’s Working in Affiliate Marketing in 2019”. The 200-page document covers insights from a variety of stakeholders, including ecommerce experts, SEO experts, traffic networks and affiliates.

The ‘Bird’s Eye View’ section suggests dating (combined mainstream and adult) is one of the top three categories for offers, as measured by the number of positive comments from industry experts. It loses out only to Nutra (health and beauty) and ecommerce categories on this metric.

A number of contributors described dating as an ‘evergreen’ category for traffic. Jørgen Bogetveit, CEO of Plugrush, says: “The evergreen vertical continues to be dating, casual and otherwise, which still dominates.”

Austin-based email marketer John Alanis gave his take: “I used to focus on dating, but now focus on what is more accurately called the ‘horny guy’ business, since there is an enormous amount of horny guy traffic out there and always will be.”

Internet marketer Yi Hao Ten added that dating was surprisingly stable, noting that “everyone assumed it was going to die off after Facebook banned dating offers”.

A number of trends emerged in the report. One such trend was that ‘BlackHat’ approaches to online business were becoming more difficult as search engines and other platforms seek to incentivise ethical behaviour.

Another was that despite digital businesses being easy to operate remotely, face-to-face connections were still extremely important.

As well as editorial content, STM Forum provides “higher education, (…) conferences and local networking events”.

Read more here.