Affiliate marketing is dead. Long live affiliate marketing.

But before you accuse me of being some Chicken Little type or just another clown infatuated with hyperbole, let me explain.

The way affiliate marketing was done back in the 1990s — and still today by some folks — is done. I’m talking about banners. It’s all about Affiliate 2.0, and you might already be late to the game.

What is Affiliate 2.0?

You’ve probably seen those definitions of Web 2.0 that sound more like a game of buzzword bingo than a definition. Well, I’ll keep it easy: Affiliate 2.0 is the stuff you’re probably not doing.

Now, that could be a pretty long list, so let’s skip all of the specialties of affiliate that you already should be concentrating on, like data feeds, search engine optimization, e-mail and pay per click. Instead, let’s look at affiliate-marketing opportunities in Internet video and mobile phones.

Affiliate video opportunities

Video creative with affiliate links built in is being crafted by professional video producers. There’s also amateur user-generated content, which is wildly popular on sites such as MySpace and YouTube.

According to the comScore Video Metrix report for July 2007, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month. This translates into nearly 134 million Americans watching more than 9 billion videos online.

“Besides the obvious Google universal search benefits of having a well-ranked video, affiliates should understand that if they move quickly, they can saturate and dominate just about any niche with video right now,” says Jim Kukral, co-host of the VideoNinjas radio show on www.WebMasterRadio.FM. “It’s just a matter of doing it, right now, before another affiliate does it.”

Google AdSense video units, a new advertising unit that can be embedded on AdSense publishers’ sites/blogs, got lots of press when it rolled out in fall 2007, but it’s not the only game in town for affiliates in video.

As far as affiliate networks go, LinkShare has been something of a leader in video with Flex Links, which offers affiliates the capability to post videos, widgets, flash or any other kind of clickable objects from advertisers on their sites to earn commissions.

Other players in the video arena that are providing affiliates with the opportunity to earn commissions include Adotube, blinkx, Magnify.net, Metacafe, Qoof, Revver and Toldya.

Phoning in affiliate innovation

While video gets all of the headlines as the vehicle where marketers need to have a presence in 2008, mobile phone marketing quickly is making headway and putting performance-based ads in front of a multitude of eyeballs.

In September 2007, Google launched AdSense for Mobile, a program that allows AdSense publishing partners the ability to earn revenue from their mobile Web sites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads. This opportunity is a little tricky for a lot of affiliates, since AdSense for Mobile requires server-side scripting — unlike the client-side scripting in JavaScript — which is not supported by most mobile browsers or Web pages.

There are two Google AdSense for Mobile ad formats: single and double. Participating mobile Web sites must be written in one of the following markup languages: wml (WAP 1.0), xhtml (WAP 2.0) or chtml.