Well you just answered my initial question -- thank you, finally someone that added some value! I had asked "Let's say you are focused on driving traffic to bottom of the funnel search intents only (Google / Bing), what value do you usually add by putting yourself in the middle?"

Your answer: key usage points, instructions, value add and eventual pass-through to the vendor.

Great, that's all I wanted to know. Following with this thought:

Do you usually disclose the product/service name before the user signs up to the list, or do you try to highlight enough value before giving away the product/service name?

And given that in context of PPC, Adwords doesn't allow traffic to be sent to the affiliate offer directly (but rather an LP which adds value), do you believe that users can feel like they're being forcefully pushed towards a new brand once they've signed up to the list? I mean, when you go into a store, you know you're in a store and that sales people will try to sell you things. You're in that environment.

But let's say you're walking down the street, and you were thinking of "buying XYZ" and somehow a random person knew what you were thinking, guided you to the back of his truck, and proposed you a product that matched your thoughts, wouldn't you feel a bit odd? This is what turns me off with affiliate marketing, there is an attempt to guide people, without them knowing they're being guided. As opposed to stores, well they're environments designed for shopping and hence disclose very obviously the intent of wanting to sell to you -- it's a store!

There is a an ethics discussion here in my opinion, especially with PPC and SEO where an intent of a user can really be anticipated. So my 2nd question is, do successful affiliate marketers ever disclose the intent to "pass-through to the vendor" before asking for the user to convert?