Watching episode 9 really ticked me off. Eliminating John Chow was the final straw. I think it should be made clear, that the real [insert profanity here] in this whole show is one of the producers, Thor Shrock.
Seriously, you hold a contest like that, and expect every contestant to put forward all of their own resources and cash. Each contestant should have been allocated a set budget and to a certain extent be put on an equal playing field. It should have been as simple as that.
I dont know all of the details, but lets say the contestants on team zy7.com are not prepared to fork out their hard earned cash to participate in the challenge. Why do you point the finger at John Chow. Do you expect him to put his hand in his pocket and fork out his own personal cash to support the producers of the show? Get Real.
Only one person could win the show, that is a fact. John Chow, assessed the member on his team who would most likely win due to his connections with an experienced and successful affiiate marketer. He adopted what looked like a reasonable strategy, to not use any sponsorship money which he solicited early on, but instead use it in the later challenges.
It is the affiliate challenge for the members, they are the ones meant to make the money, not the guru’s. So did John Chow tie their hands to a chair and stop them from making any money? If they did not approve of his strategy, they could have made money and won the challenge for their team. Shoemoney himself commented after the first episode how little his team had contributed.
Besides anyone with any degree of intellect can see the whole show is a complete joke, it is not a top affiliate challenge, it is just a gambling contest of how much each person/team is willing to gamble their personal savings for a chance of winning half of the final profits. I still don’t know where the other half goes to. In any fair contest, you put all contestants on a level playing field, and test their skills. Also the fact that they did not clearly define the rules at the start and kept changing the rules as they felt like it, makes the show an even bigger joke.
Their is no glory to the winner of the top affiliate challenge, whoever wins has just bought their hollow victory. The prize is equally as lame.
And since this is akin to a gambling contest, spare a thought for all of the contestants who have gambled their personal money and lost.
Yes the real villain here is the shows producer, Thor Schrock, not John Chow as has been portrayed.
John Chow is an intelligent funny guy, who also happens to be quite charitable as well. This will not affect John Chow, who will no doubt continue to go on to do bigger and better things. As one of his loyal supporters who enjoys reading his blog, my regard for him has not diminished.

Well, I am one of the few people who will say I actually like watching the topaffiliatechallenge show.
The show is a mess and I get the feeling it might not last the entire three weeks it is meant to.
The things I like about the show are.
1. Im a John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker fan, so it is good to see them on the show, even though Jeremy has had to withdraw from the show due to the birth of his daughter, there is a chance that he may continue to make guest appearances.
2. Monica Durazo, the host of the show is a real hottie. People have commented negatively on her presenting skills, but she makes the show interesting.

Ok that is just about all I like about the show.
The things I dont like about the show are
1. Being an affiliate challenge, they should have probably had guru’s that were more highly into affiliate marketing, off hand, Paul Borque from uberaffiliate.com and Ahmit Mehta from superaffiliatemindset.com are two people that come to mind.
2. Very very very poorly managed, they seem to be making up and also changing the rules as they go along. From day one, they should have made the rules, conveyed those rules to the participants and guru’s and stuck to them. They should have secured funding from affiliate companies, so that each team for each episode was given a set amount of money and had to grow that money via affiliate marketing, perhaps even nominated the niche for each challenge. The way it is now, it is a complete disaster, I fully agree with Ian Fernando’s comments here. I would have liked to see Ian win the challenge, but really the rules are total garbage, anybody can use their personal funds, make a loss and win the individual challenges, seriously where is the challenge in that. To be asked to put your own funds in for each challenge is completely ridiculous. That should have been secured from sponsors.
3. The videos are poorly hosted and take forever and a day to load.
4. Dodgy challenges, one of which was to see how much spam you can do within an hour, that was in poor taste.

Tim Schroeder from emonetized.com made an interesting post on how he exceeded his goal to make US$7,500 in a month from the affiliate network cxdigital. He made US$15,392.50 which equates to over $550 per day. Hard to say how much of that is actual profit, but not a bad result, and proof positive of the importance of setting goals and working towards them.

Techcrunch had the scoop on the launch of AuctionAds.com the new ebay auction banner ad program which appears to be a joint venture between Jeremy Schoemaker (shoemoney) and MediaWhiz.com. The site is very basic, the faq page contains a few of the key details on the program. Apparently initially they are offering 100% of the ebay commission fee for an initial period, not sure what the percentage split would be further down the track. I have read some interesting favourable reviews on this system when it was previously being run as shoemoneyads.com, so it will be interesting to see how this new service takes off. Definitely a fantastic idea, if the technology develops, could be a possible ebay buy out target for the technology and development team.

Noticed this picture on the shoemoney website, it shows Jeremy Schoemaker holding a $500,000 check. Now first off, nobody usually gets a commission check for such a round figure, and the check is not really a big life size check, because if you look at the reflection in his black hummer, his hand is not holding anything. Still, it would be interesting to find out how much he earns from Azooogleads, he does advertise them quite heavily on his blog.
[update]: Didnt notice, but on the shoemoney site, it actually says “This is not a real check it was for a Magazine Ad”