We're just getting started over at AffiliateInsight.com, but if you'd like to see our early attempts at providing something useful in this space, please have a look:

http://affiliateinsight.com

I think it's unlikely you'll find a directory of the sort you're after which is actually comprehensive. Why? Because it takes hard work to review these programs, including actual personal experience working with them. On the other hand, it's easy to throw together a spammy 'directory' with names and URLs but little or no useful information about what the program is really like.

With regard to the embedded affiliate IDs in URLs, if you don't like them, you can always strip them out -- just right click to grab the URL underlying the link, paste into your browser window, and delete the portion which is the affiliate ID. If it's run through a PHP link farm with redirects, just run a second browser or set your browser temporarily to refuse cookies, and you'll get the same effect.

More to the point, though, why would you want to? Is there anything wrong with the person who provided you with a link to a good program getting a (usually tiny) financial reward? This seems pretty similar to what you're doing when you, as an affiliate, get a commission for sending a customer to a merchant...

Thanks,
Greg

Hi Christoph,

> thanks for your feedback - just today I came across that PayforInclusion
> directory that allows a compare at least on the business terms like
> CPA/CPC... but no cookie/tracking info... and that's a vital one I
> think...

Yes, I noticed that you'd mentioned CPA/CPC in your original post and wasn't sure I fully understood what you were after. CPC-based payments are, as I understand it, very rare in the affiliate space, as most merchants prefer to pay affiliates by sale rather than by click. CPA, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'flat commission'. Was it just full commission information you were after, whether that happened to be flat, percentage, CPC, or CPM -- rather than specifically CPA or CPC?

> Btw I like your site as it offers some nice information of various
> pharmacy affiliate programs you are member of... I am sure this could
> help the RX affiliates big time, but OTH I'm not sure if the big RX
> coverage would not maybe turn away some normal affiliates...

I'm sure you're right that broader coverage at AffiliateInsight.com would attract more potential affiliates -- after all, with affiliate programs covering everything from grocery shopping to cameras to desktop computer systems, diamond rings, satellite dishes, and more, pharmacy is a teeny little part of the whole.

Over time, I expect our main attraction to be our affiliate marketing tips blog and our datafeeds; we have no plans to become a 'mega-directory'.

I wonder what makes a "normal affiliate"?

> Your site is still missing the qualitative, formal comparison of
> tier-levels, bonuses, datafeed contents per program (like in a data
> table) but I think that won't be such big issue to add...

Yes, I see what you mean: the quantitative data is definitely there on each page covering each program, but what is missing is a table that summarizes it all. To be honest, I've shied away from that just so that I don't have to maintain two separate locations for the same information. I hope that users visitors value the actual explanation and background provided on each of the individual program pages -- but on the other hand, maybe many would prefer to dispense with that and just have the numbers in a summary table?

> Your datafeed aggregation/cleaning service sounds interesting... you may
> want to post some sample structure for the visitor as those infos could
> be interesting to decide if it fits into the own database structures...

Well, since every datafeed depends on the information provided by the merchant, there's wide variation in what datafeeds for different merchants look like, although at a minimum any useful feed would include at least the product name, price, and URL. Maybe I should make that clearer on the site -- thanks for the suggestion, and watch this space! :-)

> Regarding the 2-tier and super-affil codes in the links I have no real
> problem with that, if the site's content is acceptable... but most of the
> sites I have seen yesterday simply sucked and only had the goal to place
> the super affil cookie as fast as possible... so they were made for big
> traffic loads, not for big visitor loads...

Like you, I have little use for spammy pseudo-content. I probably don't even stick around long enough to discover whether there are embedded affiliate IDs or not!

Thanks,
Greg