Thoughts on New York Affiliates Situation: Industry Org Needed?

Michael Vorel posted an interesting tweet this morning:

I am concerned many NY affiliates will loose interest in affiliate marketing, solutions?

which was followed up with a tweet from Shawn Collins:

@vastplanet I think it could help to publicize Amazon’s battle and try to bring grassroots blog pressure on NY to get more mainstream media

The back and forth refers to the developing situation surrounding recent legislation in New York state that seeks to collect taxes on online revenue generation and immediately effects large merchants as well as the NY state affiliates.

There was a question as to whether Amazon would drop NY state affiliates, but it looks like the first large merchant to take that step is Overstock.

Shawn Collins covered it first and best at AffiliateTip Blog:

Today the Small Business Blog reports that Overstock.com has issued a notice to all New York state affiliates that they are being dropped from the Overstock Affiliate Program, effective May 20, 2008.

As the day went on, more bloggers and discussions started appearing about Overstock’s actions. Even Saul Hansell of the NY Times is following the developments with an in-depth piece and link back to Shawn’s piece:

There were two predictable fallouts from New York State’s move to force online companies to collect state sales tax: There would be a lawsuit. And some online merchants would cut off their affiliates in the state.

Then, over on ReveNews Heather Paulson covered the situation and got a very precise comment from Todd Crawford:

I am very concerned that NY sees affiliate marketing differently than other forms of online advertising like CPM and CPC. I do not understand the logic they are using that affiliate marketers create nexus for advertisers allowing them to charge sales tax. If this is not overturned, I would expect NY to extend the nexus to any online advertising – including CPC and CPM. Idiots!

As Todd and others have pointed out, this is a very short term play from NY state and will eventually cost them revenue in terms of sales tax and income tax generation from merchants and affiliates. However, states are cash strapped (I won’t get too political, but let’s just say the current administration’s fiscal practices haven’t exactly helped states deal with rising health care and education costs) and looking for ways to get into the black during an important election year when the turnout is going to be exceptionally high.

Will more states follow NY? Yes. It’s almost a certainty if NY is successful at collecting taxes from large companies such as Amazon (which it looks like will be the case judging from the NY Times piece). Does this mean affiliate marketers or merchants will suffer and eliminate affiliates working in those states? Perhaps, but I don’t think that’s a necessary certainty.

Instead of making the case that affiliates are being treated unfairly, I think our best bet as an industry is to make the case to state governments that this is an economically short minded tactic. Robbing Peter to pay Paul never works and the states will loose more long term revenue in the form of sales and income taxes than they will gain by a tax system that will surely have more holes than a sieve.

I fear it will be the affiliate marketers themselves and not the merchants who have to make this case. The merchants seem willing to either pay the tax or to stop working with NY state (and eventually others) affiliates instead of making the case against such a tax scheme.

Industry organization anyone?

Magnify Publisher Simplifies Blogging

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Magnify.net is releasing a very exciting new WordPress and MovableType plugin aimed at making it easier for bloggers to find and include images and videos into posts.

Basically, the plugin integrates easily and nicely into either a WordPress or MoveableType install and allows for a blogger to include a keyword relevant image or video to be embedded in a post within a few seconds.

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As most bloggers know, finding relevant images or video content for a post can consume a great deal of time and often lead to frustration. So, the Magnify Publisher program definitely solves a much maligned problem.

Magnify Publisher searches through popular video sources such as YouTube, Metacafe, Veoh, Blip.tv, Google Video, AOL Video, RedLasso and a number of others. At the moment, Flickr is the only available image search source but Magnify CEO Steve Rosenbaum tells me that this will soon be expanded.

Here’s an example of the video search and embedding feature:

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And here’s an example of the image search and embedding feature:

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Perhaps most compelling is the ability to also directly and easily incorporate webcasts into a blog post. So, instead o recording a video on a webcam then uploading that video to YouTube then grabbing the embed code then embedding that code into a WordPress blog, a blogger can simply press a couple of buttons and instantly get their webcam video embedded into a post.

Here’s an example:

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These are very innovative features from the Magnify team and definitely needed improvements to the current paradigm of blogging. When I spoke with Steve Rosenbuam today, he mentioned his ardent belief that popular blogs of the immediate future would be those that best blend the visual, video and text components of content creation rather than those that just focus on one specific medium.

Magnify’s Publisher plugin goes a long way in supporting his idea.

Disqus Now Has Seesmic Integration

Disqus continues to make blogging more enjoyable.

Now, you can enable video comments through Seesmic integration with Disqus. To turn this on, just head to the Configuration tab on the Disqus dashboard:

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Give it a go in the comments if you’d like to test it out (you’ll see a “Record Video Comment” option).

I’m still not sold on the general concept of video commenting, but I know that some people prefer firing off a quick video rather than typing out a response. While I’d rather type out comments on most blogs, I do see tremendous value in encouraging people to participate in whatever way they feel comfortable.

Hats off to the Disqus (and Seesmic) team for making blogging fun again.

Affiliate Summit Discount Flights

I’m a big fan of JetBlue, so this is a neat promotion for the next Affiliate Summit in Boston this August…

Special discount from jetBlue for Affiliate Summit | Affiliate Summit Blog: “Here are the details on how to book via the jetBlue promo page…

Code: ASE08
Discount: 5%
Valid Cities: Any City to BOS
Travel Dates: Outbound: 8/6-8/8 / Return: 8/12-8/14
Promo Valid: 5/2/08-8/7/08”

The discount is good for a few beverages and hot dogs at Fenway at the very least!

Txt Messaging More Expensive Than Hubble Data Downloading

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The 21st century has brought us many great wonders… like new ways for phone companies to charge outrageous prices while locking us into contracts (at least here in the US):

Scientist Says Texting is More Expensive Than Downloading From Hubble | Universe Today: “One space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester looked at the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble and compared it with the cost of sending a text. His calculations? ‘The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.'”

I guess this adds new fodder for the people who claim that Twitter is a huge waste of time and money.

Hopefully, the invisible hand of the free market will one day deliver us from our overcharging mobile overlords.

Magnify Goes Pro

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Video aggregation and community site Magnify.net has launched a “Pro” offering for users wishing to replace the standard AdSense ads on the site with customized ads.

Social network creator Ning as well as other web2.0 properties have tested out this sort of thing before. For example, on Ning you can purchase a Pro account for $19.99 a month to replace their AdSense ads with your own ads.

However, Magnify.net is doing something a little different with the option to pay for custom ads based on pageviews in units of 5,000 ($24.95), 25,000 ($84.95) and 50,000 ($159.95). Users can also remove Channel Creation links ($5.95 monthly) and enable contests for a premium monthly fee ($125.00).

Google’s Friend Connect and Long Tail Marketing

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This is interesting. Basically, sometime tonight you’ll be able to grab a snippet of code and install it on your site/blog allowing you to combine that site with your activities in various social networks…

Google Press Center: News Announcement: “Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.”

Here are some of the more “long tail” implications of Friend Connect:

“Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

And here are the immediate benefits possible:

Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.

Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.

Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.

Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

I see this as the culmination of the widget craze that swept the online world in 2007 and a way to start bringing in tangible benefits for website owners and bloggers. In other words, the more efficient back-and-forth between social networks and sites/blogs will only increase traffic and exposure for both (if the person behind them is interesting, relevant or adds something to the viewers’ lives).

New Affiliate Summit Social Network Could Actually Be Useful

If you have followed me for any length of time, you know that I’m a chronic social networker. I jump on things like Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, FriendFeed, Seesmic, etc and often call them the “next big thing.”

I know it’s annoying, but sometimes I do get it right (like with Twitter).

So, I’m particularly excited to see the new Affiliate Summit network being moved to Ning…

New Affiliate Summit Social Network | Affiliate Summit Blog: “Affiliate Summit has launched a new social network for conference attendees on Ning.

Based on a poll, as well as feedback on Twitter and directly to us, Ning was the clear favorite over the previous social network technology from Confabb.”

If you’ve never played with Ning, you really should. It beats forum software like phpBB etc hands down and offers a number of options for integration with things like your blog feed or Twitter or Flickr.

And I’m especially excited about the Summit’s move to Ning because the previous Confabb system was atrocious from a usability standpoint.

This time around for the ASE Boston show, I really think we can derive some benefits from this iteration of the social network.

Head over and sign up. You just might like it (and find it profitable).

Twitter Track

I’ve been arguing that Twitter users should abandon desktop clients (until Twhirl gets their xmpp gateway going) and use GTalk for Twitter. Not only is the GTalk gateway real time, but there are a few key benefits that enhance the Twitter experience.

Here’s a great post from @tw3nty3ight about how he uses Track and GTalk for Twitter in a similar fashion that I do (on the desktop and on the BlackBerry):

Tw3nty3ight.com: How I Get The Most Out Of Twitter: “There is a very useful Twitter command that is overlooked by many. The TRACK command is the most underused command on twitter. In order for me to be notified of someone mentioning anything pertaining to myself I simply utilize this feature. There are two main ways to use this command, text (SMS) or IM with Google Talk. “

I follow around 1500 people. Watching that kind of a stream all day would render Twitter pretty useless for my needs. So, with the device updates setting on IM, I’m able to “turn on” just the 50 or so people that I’m really interested in following and use Track for my name or topics I want to hear about to catch the rest.

Give it a go if you need to cut the signal-to-noise ratio.