I'm not sure what my own opinion is on this, but I thought it was a very provocational on the part of Barclaycard and might stir some interesting debate.

As of a couple of days ago Barclaycard have started offering a £50 Amazon voucher on their own site if you get their lead product (a 22 month balance transfer card). It sounds great, but it's not available to affiliates or partners of Barclaycard (oh, other than Martin Lewis).

What's probably even more frustrating is that the voucher they are offering customers direct is worth double what they would offer affiliates as a commission (I used to be in this vertical). Essentially, you have a crappy product versus the one on their site and you know from what they are giving customers direct that they could pay double to affiliates!

So what do you do? Well...the short answer is "run for the hills" ditch credit cards and focus on something with a future, and here's why! (please read in the style of Good Will Hunting)

MBNA have pulled out of the UK as of a few days and everyone else (mostly government owned) is offering pretty shabby products - so you can't ditch Barclaycard. But then their new strategy will effectively kill off affiliate credit cards marketing.

Perhaps the market will redress the situation - marketing costs can only go as high as the commissions available will allow - but my guess is that it will take so long for that to happen that a number of Barclaycard affiliates will give up on the space.

Now if you are one of those affiliates who have to ditch previously profitable areas of your business, because of this change in the Banks marketing strategies, and you like your revenge served cold, hold tight.

The customers of the affiliates who withdraw from the market will have to go somewhere for a Balance Transfer (Lord knows we all have enough debt!) and from all the noise coming out of Google and BeatThatQuote at moment we know they expect the Lion's share to go there. Once Google do get that position of dominance they will turn the screw on Barclaycard (annual double digit grow does not come from not being evil). They will use their virtual monopoly to drive up prices, use the learnings to develop their own Barclaycard beater and....oh, Goodbye Barclaycard.

Well, what goes around comes around!

Hopefully everyone in the credit cards space will have moved onto other things by then. Let's just hope that short-sighted folks at Barclaycard don't go on to manage any of the other product verticals you might end up in otherwise the merry-go-round will start again.

Come to think of it, I do seem to have an opinion. What's your?