Ok so I’m not sure if I’m the first one to write about this…but the Top Affiliate Challenge TV show officially sucks. It looked like it could be O.K. at best, but after finding out how it works and watching the first episode, I can confirm why I knew it would be a waste of time and money to audition and try to get on the show. Here’s why :

• Their whole “business model” for competition is stupid. The goal is to make “as much money as possible through affiliate marketing”. They look at revenue as making money, and not profit. So a team can spend $5,000 in PPC and only make $1,000 in revenue. That’s a $4,000 net loss but in the eyes of TAC, you just made $1,000.
• How do they expect you to learn and get a profitable campaign running in like 2 hours? The team that wins will simply be the team that takes a little loss and switches their campaigns over to the team’s affiliate link. I was working with Team XY7 a little and was about to move over a campaign that does ~$1,500/day (they would still fund it), but just thinking about doing something like that for this show is completely pointless. That’s totally against the point of having a challenge to find the “top affiliate”.
• The camera work looks like it was done with a $100 Flip video camera and edited by a 15 year old freshman in high-school. There’s cheesy ass hues on the border of the screen, ridiculous looking fonts, the whole thing looks insanely cheap. They’ll be talking and it will just break the frame and cut to a new one, it’s not smooth at all.
• The host looks like she just learned how to read and is reading the script off a piece of paper. Oh wait, you’ll see her looking at the ground all the time, and the awesome camera man has her script showing laying on the floor.
• The gurus pulled together their elite resources and drove a massive $200 revenue for the win on the first day.
• I just skimmed through the second episode which leaked on Google Video. Team XY7 lost, so one of their teammates was going to get voted off. Then they had an individual immunity challenge, somebody from a different team won it. Why the hell would someone that wouldn’t get voted off anyways win an immunity ring? The guy is a saint though and ends up giving it to someone from XY7. The hostess then tells him it doesn’t even matter, because that person is safe anyways. Umm…pointless?

I have nothing against Thor as he was nice to me when I chatted with him about auditioning, but the show is a complete mess. I can’t even sit through a full episode without being completely bored to death, the show teaches absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing, and since it’s not even entertaining it’s completely pointless to watch.