Revenews reports that MarketingSherpa released a large research report on the state of affiliate marketing. It found that despite a panoply of industry kicking trends - such as fights with "cookie stuffers," Can-Spam issues, threats to paid search arbitrage - affiliate marketers remain upbeat and expect increased revenues in 2005. 10 out of 11 merchants surveyed say they will continue to do better, and 9 out of 11 affiliates say the same. On the downside, merchants showed they currently plan to continue their extremely unsophisticated levels of tracking, which will prevent them from figuring out which affiliates are the bad eggs, even if those issues listed above become problems. This may lead to merchants painting all affiliates with one big, broad brush.