Rant: Affiliation
Posted 24 June 2009
A trendy thing in the pokemon fandom recently is to categorize affiliates into “tiers”. Usually they go something like: Siblings, Top Affiliates, Affiliates, International Affiliates, Junior Affiliates, Mini Affiliates, and Friends. Really, I don’t know why people fall into this pattern. It is mostly pointless. I will admit that Siblings make sense if they are actually sibling sites, i.e. you share stuff and chat a lot. That’s great and fine, and the rough equivalent of that would be Friends. That’s not the problem really. The problem is ranking it, especially by an arbitrary thing like page count or unique hits. Which, really, has little to do with the actual quality of the site. If it really doesn’t fit into your affiliate list qualitatively, why do you have to affiliate with them? You can encourage them and give them some suggestions. And really, affiliates are a very… interesting concept. It is really only used by fandom and fandom-esque graphic design websites. And fanlistings. The whole concept of affiliation is strange and at times quite pointless. At least, if you’re looking for hits. It’s better if you’re trying to show the people that frequent your site the kind of thing you enjoy and what you think is good. Maybe they can then go visit that site and appreciate it the way you do or see it in their own way. That is how, ideally, affiliates would work. Sites would be evaluated qualitatively instead of primarily quantitatively. It wouldn’t matter if one site had 100 pages and another only 7. If the site with 7 had excellent writing, I would definitely affiliate with it even if my site was huge.
But back to the original issue. There isn’t a need for so many affiliates. Should you really be affiliating with sites in a foreign language? Maybe if you’re site is in that language as well, I guess you could. However, it makes no sense to link an English website to a Spanish website or a Korean website, as you can’t assume that most of your users will know the language.
What’s worst of all is Junior Affiliates, Mini Affiliates, Budding Affiliates, whatever you can call them. Now I’m all for supporting new sites, but I don’t see how throwing someone’s button onto a desolate page hidden amongst the pages of actual content on your website is a helpful thing. Instead, I would suggest helping out that webmaster, making suggestions, and affiliating with them as they improve. Really, affiliates are a catch-all term for sites that you enjoy and sites that enjoy you and agree to provide (minimal) support for each other. It’s not really just a link exchange, though I think most people treat it as such. At the very least, you should be friendly and affable to your affiliated webmasters. It doesn’t hurt, especially because you both share a love for pokémon, or whatever else your site is about that brought their affiliation about.
All in all, I would suggest that you keep at most three affiliate categories. Your friends and/or sibling sites – sites that you are really close with. I can understand a Top Affiliates section if your site is particularly large and gets a lot of hits. At that top tier of the pokémon fandom, it is mostly about gaining hits and visitors. However, below that, I think there needs to be a friendly relationship between webmasters on terms of affiliation. You’re affiliated, after all, and by putting that sites button or link on your site, you are endorsing them. If you’re so embarrassed that you hide them on another page. If they’re so small that they don’t deserve a space on your layout’s sidebar, then I don’t think you should be affiliating with them. In the ends, hits don't matter. The internet is not serious business, and really it's not much to brag about.