Last week I posted an article on ReveNews that sparked quite a bit of discussion. I pointed out Yahoo's new Coupon shortcut where they are pulling coupons and posting affiliate links to the stores offering the coupons at the top of some of their organic search results. I further hypnotized that this could be the beginning of Yahoo and other search engines getting a taste for commission revenues and indicated that I thought it could lead to them looking for more ways to turn the organic listings into commissionable links. The basic theory goes that since the search engines are just large publishers with lots of traffic, and since their goal is to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for, and since they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize revenues, then it isn't too far fetched of a concept to think that search engines could identify which companies had affiliate programs available, and turn the standard "free" links that currently point to these sites into "commissionable" links. Why not get paid for the traffic.

Well as you can imagine this sparked a lot of discussion. At last count there were over 56 comments and growing daily.

Then today, I friend of mine pointed out a posting on Search Engine Watch's Blog saying they had discussed the coupon links with Yahoo and that Yahoo was aggregating coupons and rebates from multiple sources for these links. Additionally Yahoo let them know about a new shortcut that links to their internal shopping engine for search terms that include the word cheap, like "cheap plasma tv":

This is one more indication that search engines are starting to test using their search results to push traffic to revenue generating sites "and / or" internal monetized properties. This is what Google Base is all about as well.

Clearly the free lunch for merchant traffic via search engines will get harder and harder to come by, and search engines will continue to look for ways to enhance the user experience by manipulating the results to get customers what they want faster, as well as through sites and properties that will earn the search engines more money.

As much as people might like to argue about it, this is clearly the natural evolution of search engine results.

Is it the end of affiliate marketing, NO! Is it an opportunity for savvy affiliates and affiliate managers to cut specialized deals with search engines, ABSOLUTLY!