Is Affiliate Marketing dead?

The changes in the search arena over the last 12 months have had a profound effect on affiliate marketing. Certainly, we have felt the cold clammy hand of Google on our shoulder, pulling us inexorably back towards the abyss. It seems that every animal Google has thrown has hit one, some or all of our affiliate sites squarely in the face, first there was Panda which hammered so called "thin sites" and elevated useless news and blog sites, then there was penguin chopping away at duplicate content sites - if you have 30 sites with thousands of products its actually quite difficult to produce meaningful original content, or so we found! The final nail in the coffin came with additional renditions of Panda and Penguin as well as the EMD update - the slaughter of exact match domains. Our revenues have plummeted by some 70% in 12 months, we still have three or four sites that make money but even they have dropped substantially. Its impossible to fight Google - they are god like, unquestionably more powerful than most governments and ONLY in it to pillage as much money as possible while paying as little tax as is possible. Are Googles natural search results any better than before - lots of Amazon, Google shopping, ebay and other big players for the big producing keywords, especially in our main fields, but little variety and few smaller businesses now get a look in. We refuse to do any Adwords - the massive increases in cost per click has meant the profit margins are tiny - hardly worth it. Are Google biting the hand that feeds them? We'll see, only time will tell. Any ideas thoughts, wanna buy some good exact match aged domains? Get in touch.

Its been a long long time - 5+ years

At least 2 years since the last post and much has changed - in the pron business and the affilite marketing game.....thanks Google. Not sure what to do with this blog now, probably close down, any ideas?