Why doesn't the affiliate industry widgitize?

Hot on the heels of acquiring Yourminis, AOL have bought a UK affiliate company, buy.at. I know buy.at for various reasons, including talking to their VC about widgets, meeting their founder at last year's LIFT conference and signing up for an account. I've long been convinced that affiliate companies by their very nature are essentially widget companies. That is, their distribution mechanism is the provision of chunks of code that their affiliates embed in their web sites. So it seemed to go without saying that they would look at automating and simplifying what is in fact a very complicated and tedious method of identifying, selecting and embedding code. buy.at's VC knew this and we had a long conversation about it. I met their founder and got on very well with him. So I signed up for an account to check out what they were doing well. And what I found was one of the most horrible interfaces and systems I've come across. Now, there are quite a few affiliate companies doing very interesting things with widget interfaces. And buy.at seemed to do well, so they must do something right. But there still seems to be space in the market for what we've been theorizing as Affiliate 2.0 companies.

AOL Acquires Affiliate Marketing Network Buy.at

Regardless of what Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) has planned for it down the road, AOL continues to make acquisitions… the latest is UK-based affiliate marketing network Buy.at. The acquisition will be used to bring a performance-based component to AOL’s Platform-A advertising offering. Basically, Buy.at, which is backed by DFJ Esprit, offers a pay-per-action alternative to traditional impression or click-based ad campaigns. Ticketmaster and Swarovski are among the advertisers in its network. Recently, the company has introduced new offerings specifically aimed at marketing content and marketing on social networks.