I have been on both sides of the affiliate marketing business and have run 3 different affiliate marketing programs, each with an excess of 10,000 members and all of which were profitable.  I have run these programs through Linkshare, Commission Junction and Digital River so I would say that my experiences over the year of pretty widespread and I am relatively knowledgable about the business.

On the affiliate side, I am currently part of StarReviews, a network of websites that provide 1,000s of news and reviews on websites, products and services but is also an affiliate marketing website.  We do not sell placements on StarReviews, but we do get paid when we make a referral to sell a product (we don’t do this as a non-profit).  We have relationships with hundreds, if not thousands of advertisers that are trying to promote products or services.
My very first program was in 1999 with Linkshare (yes, I said I have been doing this for a while) and while we were aware that 10% of the affiliates were driving 90% of the business we still wanted as many affiliates as we could get.  I know that my thoughts were that even if an affiliate doesn’t drive a sale, if they have our banner up then it is one more place that a consumer could see my business and most importantly, it doesn’t take any work on our side.  We would put together promotions that we would pay $10 just to put a banner up … knowing that they would never take them down.  I think that initial program capped out at about 15,000 affiliates and that was in 1999 but back then we thought bigger was better even though only 100 or so of those affiliates really drove sales.

I am not sure where this started but I believe it was in one of the big two affiliate programs that decided to "trim" affiliate programs of inactive members -- or ones that are not performing up to their standards.  So over years as an affiliate we have received periodic notices that we are being cut from a program because we aren’t driving enough traffic.  I laugh at the person who sent this email as if I send 1 click a year to that affiliate program … what effort are we talking about?  I obviously am not expecting support, you don’t have to write me a check and you have already put me in the base tier with all the other affiliates.  But if I send 1 click a year … that is at the very least, one person who has seen my banner and clicked on it and we have no idea how many others have seen the banner and remembered it the next time they saw my advertisement elsewhere.

StarReviews Top 3 Affiliate Programs

1) oneNetworkDirect

2) Commission Junction

3) LinkShare

Compare All Affiliate Programs

I have often wondered why these affiliate managers like to trim programs or I should say, why their managers tell them to trim programs.  My assumption is that they have metrics that they want to advertise and those underperforming affiliates negatively affect those metrics.

My suggestion to any person running an affiliate marketing program is to ignore any suggestion of trimming your programs.  There is simply no reason to do so.  It does not take any of your time and your banner is on a website it is just one more place that someone can start to identify with your brand.