Missing Memes

FMTC announces a fun contest. Submit your meme or comic!

We adopted again over Christmas. As parents know, less sleep and more baby leaves one vulnerable to illness, snacking, and … doom scrolling. I can be a sucker for listicles about books, life, and business. One such post on X (formerly/forever Twitter) about 50 realizations gave me my own realization. Number 47: “Pick a niche and make a meme page. If you understand the memes, you understand the people. Don’t build until you understand the memes.”

This gave me a startling realization: Mainstream affiliate marketing doesn’t really have any meme culture that comes to mind. In fact, I can’t even think of anything particular to the space.

I asked my team about this, and a year-old Reddit page and a list of the “20 biggest mistakes you can make in your affiliate marketing business” were found, but they seem to prove the point because they were specific to the lead space. The first was about making money (or not) with offers. The second is content marketing from an affiliate hosting and template provider. Neither one is new or unique but rather known and repurposed, mostly just with text. If you were outside the affiliate marketing niche, looking to understand it, you’d have no memes to go by.

Contrast this with industry news site AdExchanger, which has a recurring comic strip that very nicely describes the culture, quirks, and controversies of the programmatic space. Someone outside the niche could reference this content to understand the space — or even build a product for it. 

Affiliate probably isn’t being held back by a lack of cartoons, but it still feels like something is missing and that we’re worse off for it. To help remedy this, FMTC is excited to host a fun contest:

• Submit a meme, cartoon, etc. about the affiliate space. AI-generated images are fine. Repurposed memes are acceptable (but they should be especially clever and not, like, lame).
• Entries are due by January 31. 
• FMTC will publish good (i.e., not lame) entries in the future.
• $1,000 in cash prizes: $500 to the winner, $350 to second place, and $150 to third place. 

To submit, just email us at [email protected]. We look forward to seeing your wit and humor!