As an affiliate, I prefer being part of an affiliate network.
All my revenue is pooled together and paid in one lump sum.
If you sign up directly with each company, you have to wait till your income reaches a certain level before they will pay you. So, you have to sell A LOT Of an individual product/service to receive your payment.
Whereas with an affiliate network, you're pooling all your sales together. If I generate $1k per week in sales, they wire it directly to my bank account every week. It would be much harder to do that for an individual product on it's own.
Also - using an affiliate network streamlines your income. It's much easier to keep track of activity on 2 or 3 affiliate networks than it is to track 50-60 products. You know who is going to pay you, when, and how much.
The companies that I'm a direct affiliate of, for instance, information/ebook type items, pay out every month regardless of how much commission is due.
Honestly, as an affiliate, I go on a case-by-case basis. I love CJ.com and ShareaSale.com and Clickbank.com as they are consolidated and easy to promote.
However, I will certainly sign up for an affiliate program run by an individual company, as well.
The biggest deciding factor for me is the product. If it's really a fantastic product that I'd recommend with or without an affiliate link, then I'll sign up for the program. That being said, I am getting burnt out by individual affiliate programs because they keep changing their tracking systems and it's frustrating to promote something and get it loaded into my autoresponder and push it, then get an email that they're switching programs -- or worse, not get the email and find out six months later after sending traffic to a dead link. So, I'm definitely cutting down the number of individual programs that I'll promote in the next year to make it more managable for me.
I also do both. I am more interested in the product or service to promote, than whether it's in a system like Clickbank or an individual affiliate program.
Ditto everything Nicole said - except that I have had the same experience with merchants inside of larger networks. Sometimes they switch networks, which results in the changing links. Probably the most frustrating thing about affiliate marketing in general, but not just an issue with the indie merchants.
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