Quicken and Quickbooks Move to MyAP

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The much talked about MyAffiliateProgram v9 platform has landed another large merchant client.  Intuit Inc. has announced that it will use MyAP for its Quicken and QuickBooks affiliate programs.

Intuit has joined a number of our marquee clients, like Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yamaha, in choosing MYAP to manage their affiliate relationships, said Todd Farmer, president of KowaBunga!. The increasing complexity of affiliate marketing and partnering strategies makes it appealing for companies to find more powerful solutions to manage their affiliate channel.

MyAP v9 has received a good deal of buzz in the network and hosted solution spheres lately because of its flexibility and ability to offer highly specific an drilled-down stats across various channels.

Will 2007 bring more defections from networks such as CJ or Linkshare towards networks such as Kowabunga or ShareASale?

(I hear Jim K wants a ticket to the WWE Smackdown event at Quicken Arena tonight if anyone has a connection).

Will the New SSL Safety Features in IE7 Hurt Small Merchants?

40mm-padlock.GIFSmall merchants who rely on channels such as affiliate marketing could possibly be feeling some unwanted side effects of the adoption of IE7 and other web browsers such as Opera in January when Microsoft will begin to use a new verification feature to stop phishing scams.

The problem could be in a new digital certificate that can better verify a site’s legitimacy than the older “SSL padlock” which was readily available for large and small merchants and included a rather simple approval process.

The new system is far more thorough, but because of the way that it works, many small businesses will be excluded. They can still get an SSL certificate, but their sites won’t get the green “safe” bar in IE7 and Opera.

The new platform will be called “EV” which is short of Extended Validation SSL Certificate and includes a lengthy and purposely more difficult approval process in an attempt to stop the rise of scams and phishing sites who can currently obtain SSL certificates.

Here are the draft guidelines (pdf file) which go into exhaustive detail about what certificate authorities must and must not do when issuing EV’s.

To give only a single example, certificate authorities must ensure that the address they are given by the company is its actual place of business. If the CA is unable to verify this using public records, it must send “a reliable individual” on a site visit to the address. The visitor must look for a permanent sign, must note whether the building is a condo, office building, strip mall, etc., look for evidence that ongoing business is taking place at the location, and must take photos of the exterior and the reception area.

Small merchants (especially pertinent to our niche) need to develop a way to deal with such rapid changes to make sure visitors and potential customers to their sites know they are on a “safe site” for purchasing items and giving away private or credit card information. Otherwise, www.jennifersbakedgoods.com (I’m not sure if that’s a real site or not) won’t be able to compete.

One possibility could be a dual or split program where smaller merchants have different amounts of hoops to jump through in order to gain EV status rather than going through the same exhaustive process as Forbes 100 companies. However, such dual programs might allow the phishing sites the CA/Forum is attempting to head off access to certification.

Ars Technica has more here.

Yahoo News has more here.

The Affiliate Blog List

affiliatelboglist.pngScott Jangro has released his Affiliate Blog List project.

It’s part affiliate blog index where you can perhaps discover some new affiliate marketing blogs. It’s part RSS reader where you can see the latest affiliate blog entries all in one place. And it’s part Digg — you can give individual blog entries a boost in the rankings (or the opposite).

The site is impressive in its functionality and simplicity out of the gate, so be sure to visit and subscribe to the feed there. Take the time to pour through some of the entires and vote on them as well.

A social news “Digg-style” ranking system for affiliate blogs is highly needed and Scott has provided a great resource for all of us here.

It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Advertising) Revisited

pop_classics_2.jpgMaybe the Flaming Lips have it right on their new album…

If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses?

Would you do it?

No no no no no no are you crazy?

Almost THREE years ago I wrote the following piece about online advertisements, spyware, banners, pops, email and the general state of online and affiliate marketing at the time. I think this is still particularly appropriate for our current place in space and time.  When I wrote this, I’d been in the industry for a while at this point and I was getting particularly upset with the state the of the whole enterprise by this point.

However, I believe in the general mission of online marketing more than anyone and know that affiliate marketing, in particular, has incredible transformational potential for society (at least of the American variety) due to its emphasis and ability to stress relationship.

Three years from now, let’s make sure we can look back on this point in time and space and realize what we have learned.

Here’s the piece…

Try to imagine life without advertisements. At this point, it is ultimately worthless to attempt such a feat. However, the backlash against advertisements has been an ongoing phenomenon well before digital recorders, email filters and pop-stoppers. The advent of the VCR brought the same apocalyptic predictions from advertising analysts. However, these reports of impending doom soon proved baseless. However, products like TiVo, the Federal Do Not Call list (60 million Americans have signed up), and email “junk boxes” (present in 54% of American homes) do present a different sort of challenge to advertisers looking for eyeballs. Can consumers ever filter advertisements out of their life? Ultimately, what do advertisements mean to the mythos of our society?

Andy Warhol took the symbol of the advertisement and was able to express an incredible amount of meaning from common icons of pop culture. Part of Warhol’s genius was his ability to reproduce images that were seemingly so mundane into complicated representations of contemporary life. In Warhol’s works, Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, Campbell Soup cans and everyday brand images become hieroglyphs (literally translated means “sacred texts”) of contemporary American life. In Warhol’s vision, advertisements serve as an important key to understanding the complex visual nature of pop society.

Public feelings and opinions aside, what fundamental service and meaning do advertisements serve in 21st century American culture? Are ads contemporary hieroglyphs as Warhol posed, or are they more defined by Dylan’s contention in his 1965 song It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)?:

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

As direct marketers, we’d certainly like to think that Warhol’s canonization of advertisements is more valid than the opinions of those who would love to see their demise, whether on email, tv or radio. However, returning to the first question posed in this article, imagine a world devoid of advertisements. Certainly, culture as we know it would be radically different.

Advertisements supply a great deal of contextualization, meaning, and dare I say, value to pop-culture. It can be argued that ads actually supply a socialization tool that helps to predict and secure norms within the culture. If it were possible to choose every advertisement that we saw as consumers, or block them entirely how would that affect the social situation held together, in large part, by advertisements?

Good or bad, advertisements have become the sacred scripture of the American dominated global pop culture. In the global culture held together by “market capitalism” the signs of the world’s great religions have been usurped by the Golden Arches and the red and white Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol tapped into this by exposing the sanctification of advertisements in their ability to supply and convey cultural truths, norms and ultimately, definition.

Where is the line to be drawn? Is spyware or adware acceptable forms of advertising? What does “acceptable” mean? Should we be subjected to so much advertising in our daily lives that it fills our memory banks to the brim and spills over? Advertising has always existed. No doubt, it always will. Advertisers have constantly sought the most eyeballs available for the dollar and looked for ways to codify themselves in the normal life of consumers. Post-modern bombardment of the sub-conscious can truly seem like a troubling issue that we as direct marketers and advertisers must face and answer. However, at a certain point, advertisements do fill the gap in our collective need for stabilization and provide social “norms” in a fragmented post-modern society.

As consumers continue to invest more time and money into “ad-blocking” technologies, the question of advertisement’s place among the masses is raised in this new context of direct, targeted and instant marketing. Will the Warhol of the 21st century proclaim the sacredness of weight-loss or mortgage html email creatives?

Verizon to Accept Ads on Mobile Phones and Online Marketing Implications

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Verizon is going to begin allowing the placement of ads on the phones of users

Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said.

In terms of online marketing, this is a huge deal. In terms of affiliate marketing, this doesn’t matter…yet.

The main reason has to do with the incredibly high CPM rates that Verizon will probably charge (through a Madison Ave agency probably) for placements. Most companies using the affiliate channel as the main resource for customer acquisition, retention and purchasing won’t notice or care… and for good market reasons.

However, larger merchants who are looking for cost effective ad buys will notice. It’s no secret that the inventory for advertising on the main online hubs is steadily beginning to reach saturation and once that plateau is hit, the market will shift back to where we were in 1998 with a space-seller market of high demand and low supply. Even with blogs, A-Listers and feed readers, most online readers will navigate (pun intended, Jason) towards a collection of hubs in the online sphere. That’s network game theory and it’s highly predictable if you have the tools and time.

Eventually (within the next 15 months), CPA will hop from the online fishtank into the mobile fishtank and begin to gobble up CPM rates and force a needed evaluation of quality placements. We’re certainly not at this point in this early stage of online and mobile marketing, but you still need to have someone evaluating this particular space for your future developments. The same thing could be said of early developments in banners, email, and even search. This game has only been in play for about a decade, so don’t get caught up in the present. Keep an eye on the past and the future as well.

Specifically, affiliate and CPA networks should take notice. No one is making use of the mobile space (yet… until the fabled acquisitions of 2007), but this is going to be lucrative space. If you are a network, get in now.

Google’s Incentive and the Open Source Movement in Online Marketing

The blogosphere has been all abuzz with the latest news from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, in that he is attempting to construct a human generated search platform to rival Google.

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.

Here, we will change all that.

There are already dozens of thoughts and opinions on whether or not this will work or if it is even original or feasible (see the holy tech trinity of Techmeme, TechCrunch and Technorati if you haven’t been following).

However, one of the questions very few are asking is whether or not Google is doing a decent job at providing access to all of the world’s information, which was one of the company’s original mission statements.

Does Google have enough incentive to provide a decent search platform? I’d argue no, because Google is at its heart an advertising company.

Dave Winer sums it up the best with:

Today Google’s profits come from ads, and that business gives them a reason to keep search weak. They want you to do a lot of searching to find what you’re looking for — and the stuff they find for you for free is competing with the stuff they make money on. So Google actually has a disincentive to make search better.

Amen, Dave.

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Whether or not Jimmy’s project succeeds or fails is important to watch, but realizing that Google’s hegemonic grip on providing quick access to our information is beginning to loosen is also important to ponder.

It means everything to online marketing.

Whether you like them or not, CPA networks reflect the democratization of the affiliate network structure which held the affiliate marketing industry back in terms of reach, technology platforms and stature within the larger scope of online marketing. In a way, CPA networks show the market’s ability to prefer democracy over hierarchical and non-transparent imposed structures.

The next 50 years will see the exponential demand for “open source” and “free” technological equipment and platforms. This will extend WELL beyond just software such as browsers (Firefox) and begin to make us question why we allow companies to set boundaries on our own entertainment and consumption habits (think of how restrictive your iPod really is on your music).

Think of fonts. If you had told any professional newspaper or magazine publisher that consumers and individuals (from 3rd graders on up to grandmothers) would know the difference between the Helvetica and Verdana fonts in 2000, they would have thought you were crazy. We don’t realize the impact that such technologies as MS Word have had on our culture in terms of opening up the publishing and content creation business to non-specialists, but now it is taken as cultural competency that kids entering college know the difference between Courier New and Times New Roman since you can squeeze an extra page and a half out of a 10 page paper if you are using Courier New rather than Times New Roman. Profs and freshmen know this, and that’s just odd considering the course of human history.

If you don’t watch Ze Frank’s The Show, you should. At least watch this episode (on this very topic) for me.

So, what does that have to do with Google and online marketing? Everything.

Consumers will begin to examine why they can’t listen to their iTunes music on more than 5 computers if they bought their music fair and square. Consumers will begin to wonder why Vista restricts the application of certain handy software programs. Consumers will begin to wonder why Google doesn’t provide the best links on the front page.

And this will happen soon.

So, don’t get stuck in the present or the 2005 as we enter the new year. Realize that it’s not a matter of consumers becoming more educated about technologies, but they are becoming more accustomed to using these technologies and realizing what things like Google, search, affiliate links and top down technologies and services can and cannot do.

Eventually this will be a mute debate, but as a species we have constantly dealt with attempts to co-opt and control the learning process, going back to the roots of literacy, trade and sociological functions such as religion. It is inevitable that everything will be open source and non-proprietary, it’s just going to take a few more thousand years to get there.

Knowledge is power and Google’s power seems to be slipping as consumers realize that Google’s main product is not knowledge, but advertising.

[As an effort to show my cards and provide disclosure, I’m a hippie libertarian (deep down I think Shawn is too) teacher/student and online marketer who distrusts efforts to make knowledge (or access to knowledge) proprietary at heart and this post was made on the Drivel blogging platform (Gnome blogging platform) inside the Linux-based open source Ubuntu OS with links provided by the Epiphany web browser (a Gnome based browser similar to Firefox but more community minded). I listen to my music (non-drm) on a Rockbox hacked iPod Mini while reading my feeds on Liferea and chatting on Gaim.]

[EDIT: Here’s the link to the Search Wikia page from Jimmy Wales.]

Newsweek Says 2007 Is the “Year of the Widget”

200612082044-1.jpgFirst, Time Magazine anoints web2.0 users as the “Person of the Year” (see below for conversations on whether or not that includes those involved in the affiliate marketing community).

Now, Newsweek is describing 2007 as the “Year of the Widget.”

“It’s better than advertising,” says Om Malik. “It’s in front of your eyes constantly; that brand becomes your brand.” Your widgets certainly don’t need to come branded, however. Indeed, that’s the whole point: to help the World Wide Web become your Web”

Nice job, Om.  It is better than advertising.  As Jeff D. says in the comments below, our experience online and offline with brands is quickly becoming a part of our own identity and in the future we’ll be debating in an explicit manner on what types of brands to associate with on a day to day basis.

As Bob Dylan sings, “Things have changed.”

Is big media reading the blogs such as CPN or Steve Rubel and making these claims in order to appear as if they are not absolutely out of touch, or have they wised up to the future? Based on media buys and advertising dollars being spent, I’d say that it is the former.

Matt Cutts on Pageviews and Rubel Says Google Digs Digg

The Holidays are in full swing here, but I wanted to give you two quality posts to check out if you have any down time this weekend…

Google’s Matt Cutts discusses page view data and defends Yahoo…

I want to come to Yahoo’s defense about something. A recent spate of reports says that Yahoo has been surpassed by various companies in terms of page views. Why is that relatively bogus? Because of Yahoo’s switch to AJAX for its mail. According to Alexa data, 49% of Yahoo visitors go to mail.yahoo.com. Everyone knows that I take Alexa data with a grain of salt, and that 49% fraction may be high, but Yahoo definitely gets a lot of traffic from Yahoo Mail. Yahoo’s new mail system uses AJAX. And how do the metrics companies handle AJAX? Typically, not well.

And Edelman’s Steve Rubel points out that Google is indexing social sites such as Digg in its blog search service.  What does that mean for SEO??  I’d argue it means a great deal

Despite the gripes about Google Blog Search and its inability to filter out spam, the site has been improving steadily. It now indexes lots of non-news content as long as it is published in a feed.

Don’t these people take a break from writing quality stuff on the Holiday weekends??  More after the eggnog kicks in…

Happy Holidays and Thank You’s

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I hope everyone has a fun, happy and warm holiday where ever you are and whatever you are doing.

Marketing is a distinct human endeavor in which we attempt to persuade, either directly or indirectly, others of the valuable nature of some service, product, program or idea that they are not yet aware of or using.  Let’s all promise each other to do marketing right (whatever that means) in the new year.

I’d also like to thank you for making CPN such a success over the last few months. Since launching at the beginning of November we all (you and me) have managed to create a pretty valuable and interesting niche community discussing some of the most important questions we could ponder in the industry.

2007 promises to provide many more additional questions, so I hope you’ll continue to come here for discussion.

I also wanted to give a few shout outs to people who have explicitly made CPN possible over the last few months with their money, time, thoughts, encouragement and links:

There are a good deal more of you out there who have participated in the discussion, given suggestions and sent a long helpful tips or ideas, but I wanted to thank those who have directly affected this site and made it such an interesting place in only two months.

2007 will be a hectic year here because of CostPerJobs, a couple of great new sponsors coming in January and some other exciting new things going on behind the scenes here and there.

There will be light additions here until next Tuesday due to the Holidays. Check this out in the meantime and leave your hopes.

Thank you again for your help and your conversations! Here’s to many more-

Sam

All Widgets Considered

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Widgets will be hot in online marketing in 2007.

Why do I keep insisting that?

The metrics are right, the market is in demand, the new OS systems rolling out (Vista, Mac’s new OS X, and even Linux distro’s like my beloved Ubuntu) are encouraging widget use, and consumer adoption has begun now that the early adopter market has been saturated.

Watch for CPA networks and affiliate networks to increasingly make use of widgets over the next six months with the ability to share new offers, reporting, coupon codes, payout increases/decreases made available on the publisher’s desktop.

It will be an exciting time.

Here are two good sites I recommend checking out to help you contemplate the widget:

During the Holiday downtime, play with a few of the widgets and give some thought as to how they can improve your program whether you’re a marketer, merchant, network or a publisher.