Credit Card affiliate sites – in trouble?

Today I received 3 emails informing me that Accucard, Create Card from Lloyds TSB and Goldfish credit cards will all be closing their affiliate programs in early May. This is after More Than, Texaco, EasyMoney, Citi Cards and Goldfish closed their programs in February/March. And don't forget Barclaycard pulled their program last year.

So this begs the question, if you run an affiliate credit card site where do you go from here? Of course there are still a few major UK credit card providers running affiliate programs such as Egg, Virgin, Morgan Stanley and Capital One. But surely not enough to be able to generate affiliate revenues from any form of credit card review site that is supposed to display and compare all the UK credit cards.

Sure, some of the credit card affiliate sites have expanded into all sorts of financial services such as loans, mortgages, insurance etc. But every day I see stand alone credit card sites that must surely be starting to feel the pinch right about now.

This could be a better illustration than any, of how volatile the industry is in which we operate. An industry where "here today, gone tomorrow" can be taken quite literally and where niches come and go in such a short space of time.

Luckily I don't really operate and major sites in the financial arena. But one things for sure; I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket and I'm now more than ever looking for new avenues of opportunity.

Music I'm listening to right now: Daft Punk - "Human After All"