Just What Is The Performance Marketing Alliance?

The Performance Marketing Alliance seems to be the latest test to see if the Affiliate Industry is ready for a group organization where everyone helps each other to better the industry kind of thing yadda yadda. It sounds like a great idea and they have gotten a lot of big industry people involved and writing about it. The idea has been tested several times before and failed. Mostly IMO due to the fact that affiliate marketing is such a loan ranger type of career. In the SEO Industry you have SEMPO which I can only comment on as an outsider. I have a lot of respect for most of its board members and it seems to be a good resource for people looking to get into the industry. Unfortunately the only first hand experiences I have had with SEMPO were pretty negative. The first experience was at SES NYC in 2006 where a SEMPO member was going table to table interrupting peoples lunches and passing out business cards for his SEO services with the SEMPO logo. This was my first experience with SEMPO and it left a really bad taste in my mouth. No doubt a few bad members can make the whole organization look bad and after talking to Dana Todd (President of SEMPO at the time) and Chris Boggs (vp of SEMPO at the time) they assured me it was just some rogue member and he would be delt with. So can the Performance Marketing Alliance be the SEMPO of Affiliate Marketing? I think its a real uphill battle. To start with I had to check 3 times before really believing that performancemarketingalliance.com was their website. It looks like a plain Jane wordpress MFA theme... and no mention of their status as a business or business address.... Of the 3 main pages on their site one is a survey page where they are asking affiliates, advertisers and even agencies a lot of questions about what they want to learn in affiliate marketing. I bet they are getting a ton of great information about what people are looking to learn from these surveys. Also there is nothing about how the data will be used. Hmm interestingly enough after poking around the site a bit it appears that it is owned by affiliateclassroom.com which sells training to affiliates, merchants and agencies. What is even more interesting is they are both on the same IP address. affiliateclassroom.com A 67.225.203.116 performancemarketingalliance.com A 67.225.203.116 (ADD MOMENT... Why is the affiliate classroom hiding their registration information on whois? red flag! ) So to me it looks like the Performance Marketing Alliance is just a vehicle to get industry data and email addresses to use for affiliate classroom's use. Maybe you have more info?