Category: Marketing

With last week’s launch of the pepperjamNETWORK and the discussion that ensued about the role of affiliate networks in the online marketing space, it’s interesting to take note of some of the other networks out there that exist (in size but not necessarily quality) between the CJ/Linkshare/Performics/ShareASale affiliate network model and the more direct response driven CPA networks.

One of those networks is North Carolina based LinkConnector. LinkConnector has been active in the industry since 2004, but it looks as if they are picking up steam and advertisers according to a new press release.

LinkConnector kicked off 2008 with nine merchants from the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide, tripling its market share reach, and closing the gap between itself and other large networks, such as Commission Junction. LinkConnector has redefined for many merchants and affiliates what it is they want from an affiliate marketing network. Many merchants from the Top 500 Guide selected LinkConnector for its exclusive technologies, not found in other networks, and for its notable list of high quality affiliates.

“Many top Internet retailers took notice of LinkConnector in 2007, seeking new and better solutions in affiliate marketing,” said Choots Humphries, LinkConnector Co-President. “Internet Retailer’s independent survey affirms that we are rapidly capturing market share. We believe this is due in part to our exclusive technologies and unique approaches, differentiating us from the crowd. We expect to again grow by more than 100 percent in 2008, providing affiliate marketing solutions to a growing number of merchants from the Top 500 List.”

So, the important question here is how networks such as LinkConnector, or the new pepperjamNETWORK or even the increasingly important CPA networks like AzoogleAds (not to mention agencies like MediaWhiz or the budding widget ad networks) will impact both the affiliate market and the more mentioned “Big 4” networks?

Is there even a “Big 4” anymore?

2008 should be fun as we find out.

Breaking Bad is a new movie TV show coming out about a high school chemistry teacher who creates his own meth lab business. Sounds like a silly movie, but the viral marketing campaign is tremendous.

Here’s one I just sent over to Jim Kurkal:

http://www.waltswisdom.com/flash/waltsplayer_ext.swf?_id=2001jsfyw1

You can waste some of your own time by freely contributing to the marketing of the movie here.

Looks like this will be a hit viral campaign along the lines of that stupid “put-your-face-on-a-dancing-elf” thing from this past holiday season.

Heading to Affiliate Summit on Feb 24-26 at the Rio Hotel (as you should be)?  Have a Mac?  Still haven’t booked a hotel room?

Then this little desktop widget is for you:

Las Vegas Travel Widget… Get travel deals on Las Vegas, Reno Nevada and Lake Tahoe. Select on back which feed you want to display. Travel deals from HotelsOnTheStrip.com which searches 28 sites using the Travelocity search engine.

Las Vegas Travel Widget: Mac Update 

Brian Chappell over at MarketingPilgrim has a list of 75 or so internet marketing professionals actively using Twitter. If you’re new or old to Twitter this is a nice resource:

Many underground conversations go on within Twitter that never make it to the blogosphere or news sites. It can be a dynamite location for link bait ideas, breaking stories, and general topics you might not think about on a daily basis. You might even find yourself obtaining clientèle through it. I really could go on and on with what you could do with Twitter.

As an aside, over on my personal blog (?), I made some remarks about how Twitter has changed since the “good old days.”

Marketing Pilgrim – 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter

Just heard from ShareASale’s piano man Brian Littleton on Twitter that the “Under the Stars” party for Affiliate Summit West will be held at the Palms (btw, that’s the 100th post for the ShareASale blog… congrats to the SaS team on that):

ShareASale will be hosting a cocktail party Sunday night February 24th in Las Vegas, in celebration of the Affiliate Summit which is being held in Las Vegas Feb 24-26.

If you’re going to be at the Summit, this is a can’t miss event.  Hopefully, no one will thrown into the pool with all of their clothes on again.

Not to continually beat up on CJ, Linkshare, Performics, ShareASale, LinkConnector and now pepperjamNETWORK but why aren’t affiliate networks doing this??

Overlay.tv is an upcoming video network that lets you add hyperlinks and image overlays to video content in order to monetize the clips. The Overlay technology and network won’t be launched until Valentine’s Day, but the service is getting some early press thanks to its funding news. $4.6 million in Series A financing has been provided by Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners.

Seriously.

There’s a ton of money and traction to be made in the video space. The tech doesn’t look that difficult considering the amount of money that the affiliate networks are making.

Lead us to the promised land of innovation, oh great networks. Please.

Affiliate marketing gets a brief mention in a Wall Street Journal article on blog monetization today. We’ve really got to get out from the Amazon.com umbrella:

Many of the most widely used ad programs — such as AdSense and Amazon.com Inc.’s affiliate-marketing program, where publishers get a cut of all sales generated from ads on their site — also are trying to make ads more appealing. For instance, they have rolled out new features in recent months to give publishers more control over how the ads look and where they are placed.

Most of the article is more geared towards widgets and video advertising.  Affiliate marketing is getting left in the dust and missing out on very good exposure to new potential merchants and publishers as a result.

Pepperjam has launched a new affiliate network called the pepperjamNETWORK. I’m sure you’ll see a great deal about it on the various online marketing and affiliate blogs, but it looks like a nice new alternative for affiliates and publishers looking for something different.

I’m particularly intrigued by the “web2.0” cleanliness, the instant chat support feature and the better tracking options for search affiliates (much needed in the affiliate networking space).

Here’s are the details from an email from Pepperjam’s Kris Jones about the network:

– Pepperjam Network addresses two of the most significant shortcomings found on other existing affiliate networks: (1) poor, unreliable communication tools and (2) lack of affiliate transparency.
– With Pepperjam Network, affiliates and advertisers can communicate in real-time via Pepperjam Chat™, thereby providing a reliable communication system to build stronger, more profitable partnerships.
– Pepperjam Network provides advertisers with an unprecedented measure of affiliate transparency, which helps to establish trust, protect brand integrity, and lays the groundwork for open, long-term, profitable relationships.
– Pepperjam Network uses Web 2.0 technology to provide affiliates and advertisers with an easy-to-use, clean interface.
– Pepperjam Network offers industry leading SID-level tracking and reporting (great for sophisticated search marketing affiliates)
– Pepperjam Network introduces pepperjamADS™, which is a first-ever affiliate marketing widget that affiliates can use to serve customized contextual ads from multiple Pepperjam Network advertisers at the same time.
– Pepperjam Network contains a knowledge vault, which is exclusive to Pepperjam affiliates. The vault contains exclusive access to a list of tools and educational resources used by Super Affiliates.
– Pepperjam Network represents over eight years of research and development and the combined ideas, feedback, and intelligence of hundreds of affiliate marketers and advertisers.
– Pepperjam Network launched with over 100 merchants and growing quickly, including Blockbuster, Jelly Belly, AeroGrow, Oscar de la Renta, BabyPhat, Rocawear, Ben Sherman, FlyCell, SinglesNet, SEOmoz Premium, and many more.
– Pepperjam Network has its own affiliate program that pays out up to $7 per approved publisher application
– Check out the Pepperjam Network Blog for videos, commentary and updates on Pepperjam Network and the broader affiliate marketing community.

Should be interesting to see the blogger and wider affiliate response today. I think this will be a hit for some publishers and affiliates looking outside the box.

Shawn Collins has put together a nifty video showing how to sign up for the pepperjamNETWORK as well.

As a caveat, Pepperjam is advertising here and on ReveNews to announce the launch (hence the banner in the sidebar) but this is something I would have covered regardless.

Problogger has a post on an interesting new AdSense format being tested with pictures. This definitely puts the widget marketing world in a precarious situation if a Checkout widget does roll out…

There’s been lots of testing of new ad formats going on at AdSense recently – but this one is really interesting – it’s a much more interactive looking AdSense unit that looks and functions a lot like Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks units.It seems to be called the ‘Google Checkout Gadget’.

New Interactive AdSense Unit with Pictures Spotted

Video blogging site Kyte.tv has announced a round of funding, added distribution and it looks as if they are adding more celebrities to compliment the popular 50 Cent channel.

Soon-to-announce-a-career-move Robert Scoble is a huge fan of Kyte.tv (and one has to wonder if this will lure him over to the video blog startup or if he’ll go with the rumor and sign FastCompany. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, he’ll be announcing around the 15th of January). He broke the news on his blog:

Kyte just announced a B-round of funding from Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ of $15 million, adding on to an earlier round of $2.25 million. Whew, the video space is really heating up.

But more significant than the money is the distribution. Telefonica has 230 million users. DoCoMo has 52 million. Nokia has 39% of the cell phone market share. If the Kyte player is embedded on these three it brings a HUGE audience to Kyte.

Also, they showed me a channel that rapper 50 Cent is doing. It has, within a few weeks, passed my Kyte.tv channel to gain the #1 spot on Kyte. More celebrity deals are in the offing, CEO Daniel Graf told me. They also shipped a new iPhone version and demonstrated an even more feature rich version coming in January.

Kyte is interesting in that it functions as a place to live blog, interact with commentors and aggregate content. Perhaps the most compelling feature is the emphasis on mobile blogging via video (which I still think is going to be a breakaway hit in 2008).

So, we’ll see if this news (especially the celebrity additions) add to Kyte.tv’s share in the growing micro-blogging/video/mobile space that is seeing a convergence revolution.

Matt Dickman has an excellent (and concise) post/video on MarketingProfs explaining what an API is and what it does.

Whether you’re a marketing geek or just someone interested in improving your web marketing, you need to at least have a conversational understanding of API’s in this web2.0 mashup world. Matt provides a good place to start.

Matt is doing a series of these posts on important terms or concepts that marketers need to understand or grasp in order to exist and survive in the current and emerging tech landscape, so keep an eye on the RSS feed there.

Google continues its foray into video with the announcement of sitemaps for video:

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata.

Here’s an example (emphasis mine):

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
     xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
   <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
   <video:title>My funny video</video:title>
   <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg</video:content_loc>
   <video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

This will facilitate Google’s indexing of video based around relevant data.  Of course, this also helps Google to properly categorize videos in order to display relevant contextual ads via AdSense.

For small to medium publishers, this could be a good chance to increase AdSense commissions if your videos are properly indexed early and often.  As seen in the
example above, Google’s spiders will be looking for keyword descriptions.

You can get going with video sitemaps through the Google Webmaster Tools page.

AdMob is an advertising network aimed at the mobile market. They interact with publishers and advertisers much in the same way as a Commission Junction or Linkshare or ShareASale, but focus on mobile ads, creatives and deliveries.

They have just released their November stats (report available here):

It is our pleasure to send you our third monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics with November data. We have appreciated your feedback and continue to add to the report. This month we have added month-over-month change calculations to make it easier to observe trends in geographic regions, manufacturers and individual handset models.

Some observations from the November data:

• AdMob Network impressions were up 4.5% November over October to 1,722,213,245. The growth was driven by Western Europe and North America.
• Apple iPhone share continued to grow and we saw a strong first full month of iPhone traffic in the UK.
• Nokia N Series devices showed strong growth in November.

The trends here are interesting to observe and digest considering the impact that mobile marketing is poised to make in the general marketing industry in 2008. Companies like AdMob are paving the way and will surely be either competitors or acquisitions of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

Barron’s is reporting that Digital River, the parent company of affiliate network oneNetworkDirect, is seeing its stock price slide today in light of lower revenue from key client Symantec resulting in a lower valuation:

Zorovic says that he now expects the software-downloading service company’s revenue from key customer Symantec (SYMC) to be down 5% year-over-year in the current quarter, rather than flat as previously expected. “As Symantec continues to focus on its costs in 2008, we anticipate it continues on setting a high performance/price hurdle for Digital River, as it did with subscriptions in 2007,” he writes. Zorovic adds that he expects ongoing investment in R&D and sales and marketing as the company develops its games offerings. He now sees operating margins next year flat versus 2007, rather than the 240 basis point he had been projecting.

I’m eager to see how the gaming offerings mentioned play into oneNetworkDirect. That is a segment of consumer culture that affiliate marketing hasn’t particularly done well (or much) with in the past. Since gaming (both console and online) continue to explode in users and revenues every quarter, it’s time that a network figured out how to leverage the affiliate channel to promote games.

Performics offers affiliates a make good for downtime earlier this month in an email to network members…

As you know from previous communications, DoubleClick Performics experienced a system outage on Saturday, December 8, 2007 due to an inadvertent complete loss of power in the DoubleClick Thornton, Colorado data center.

In light of the service disruption, DoubleClick Performics decided to do something special for its Affiliate Publishers and will pay a one-time bonus of 10% based on affiliate commissions generated on Saturday, December 15, 2007. Such bonus will be equal to 10% of the commissions earned during the entire day by an Affilate Publisher and will be reflected in the January payment statement.

We are hopeful you view this as a reflection of our commitment to your success, and the success of our Affiliate Marketing business.

We appreciate your valuable contribution.

The DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Team

LinkConnector, a North Carolina based affiliate network, launched its new product feed creatives this week.  The new creatives allow affiliates to promote specific merchant products without having to download the merchant’s entire product feed.

In other words, these are dynamic ads that allow the affiliate promoting a merchant to be choosy about products withing a data feed.  Giving affiliates a choice is always a good thing and normally works out for the merchant in terms of improved conversions as well.

According to LinkConnector:

“LinkConnector’s product feed creatives pull data directly from merchant product feeds, tools which are very important to the success of many affiliate marketers. Product feeds enable affiliates to link directly to the product or landing page specifically requested by the user. They also provide merchants with a quick way to supply definitive product information directly to their affiliates. Product feeds enable affiliates to programmatically keep their websites up to date with the merchant’s latest product pricing and promotional information. Product feeds better enable affiliates to sell the products and services of merchants, translating into increased conversions.”

While nothing earth shattering, this is a positive step in the right direction for networks.  Improving on something as “old” as product or data feeds seems rather mundane in the web2.0 world where there seems to be revolutionary new platforms being created every day, but it is essential for networks to continue to make these sorts of improvements on features we’ve all been using for years.

(Example of a Knol)

What normally causes a rage or a riot in the tech blogosphere flitters out to meaning little to nothing for the “average” web user in general or is tested and evolved before being adopted by web users outside of the Techmeme echo chamber. Interestingly enough, the things that seem to slip by most tech bloggers sometime come back to surprise us all with their impacts or ramifications for the web environment.

That might be the case with Google’s latest experiment called “Knol” (for a unit of knowledge). Google says they are attempting to get people to contribute knowledge to the web with a layer of authorial addition:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

It’s no wonder that Google is getting into the knowledge production business. And at this point, it is a business. Whereas Wikipedia has rapidly become the repository of information for those seeking deeper knowledge of a subject or topic than a query on a search engine (such as Google) can provide, Wikipedia still relies on donations and is run as a nonprofit.

Google sees the opportunity to provide a better product while also serving their famous contextual ads on top of the content and increasing their revenues (with what would certainly be highly targeted audiences). Blending authoritative information with relevant advertising equals money. And lots of it. Not only will knols rank high in the search engines, they will go hand-in-hand with Google’s search results to form a platform of trust and that spells conversions.

Google has learned well from both the under monetized Wikipedia and the over-spammed Squidoo in this endeavor. And while the announcement of the knol program went by fairly quietly in the tech world, this could be Google’s biggest move in years (up there with acquiring YouTube).

I expect we’ll be seeing more and more about knols as people realize the potential impact on the average web user.

Incredible (and promising) post from the ShareASale Blog today in context of Facebook removing the “is” from its presence platform…

Similarly, we often have things at ShareASale that we know are “broken” but are little things in the grand scope of things. I hereby apologize for all of those “little things” and am going to try to sweep through a bunch of them – as I realized today (again) how important little things are to just generating good will and making you all (our customers) happy with us.

Whatever you feel about Facebook, this is incredibly promising. We can only hope that more networks learn and adapt like ShareASale is doing.

[Edit 1/15/08 The creator of the campaign, Kirt Gunn, emailed me to let me know that the campaign never worked with PayPerPost.  Glad to hear!]

PayPerPost … er… Izea… insults our intelligence yet again. Ariel Waldman summarizes a new campaign from PPP and Garnier:

The Harry Situation site is a horrid attempt at a site, not naming what networks, lawyers, etc. they were working with, but somehow managing to spill out the fill name of “Ganier Frucits” at any chance. A quick WhoIS lookup gives a vague address and another un-Google-able Gmail address…

On this particular blog post, the site is again, linked to twice (with 2 TinyURLs). One of which is supposed to go to Todd’s “blog”, but when you click on the link, it (surprise!) takes you to an image of the “show” hosted on PayPerPost. Also, “interestingly”, the same name of the image is used on the Harry Situation blog, only this time appropriately hosted on the site. Other blogs that host the post load PayPerPost data when you visit them.

Our investigative conclusion? Not only has Garnier (and potentially associated ad agencies) attempted to “game” bloggers, by somehow believing that they will link to anything without credentials, but it seems that PayPerPost is incredibly insatiable in making themselves and any blogger associated with them become an evil empire of ridiculousness.

Whatever your feelings about PayPerPost … er… Izea… this sort of marketing stunt dilutes both the online marketing and online video effectiveness for early adopting advertisers and does nothing useful for either viewers or advertisers dumping money into such campaigns. In fact, I’m sure the poor results and backlash from this will only convince more Madison Ave agencies that online video is a fad.

Robert Sanzalone of Blognation Japan has an interesting interview with Zooomr’s Kristopher Tate in which he expounds on his vision of web development’s future.

He’s almost got me convinced…

Kristopher: My goal is simple. I’m going to make Japan the next center of the web!…

I really want to get bloggers excited in Japan. It doesn’t seem like they have much forward voice here. That needs to change. The bottom line is this: Web 2.0 is dead — the brand is. In the valley everyone is scrambling for new ideas. But Google and Facebook have sucked up core talent. There isn’t anything new or exciting happening there. It’s become a bubble. Japan holds the second largest GDP globally. It’s infrastructure is amazing. 3G is here and people know how to use technology.

Read the rest here.

I just received an email detailing a new partnership between Lucas Film’s StarWars franchise and Yahoo to promote the StarWars brand via a web2.0 style social network…

CenterNetworks has news of a partnership between Google and Hearst-Argyle Television:

Hearst-Argyle Television (NYSE:HTV) and Google have entered a new strategic agreement today where Hearst-Argyle, operator of 29 TV stations and more than 30 Websites, will become an official reseller and will use its Web sales force to provide marketers in its 26 local markets access to Google AdWords.

What this means is that Hearst-Argyle will now sell more comprehensive advertising solutions to its clients. Instead of just print and television, now they can also leverage online – helping to increase control over a client’s advertising budget.

Hearst-Argyle isn’t your daddy’s TV conglomerate anymore. With web properties such as HighSchoolPlaybook, they are branching out into a collaborative media group that is leveraging the existing (and dedicated) viewership of local TV stations to do a combination of traditional media buys, cost per action advertising and now collaborative deals with players such as Google.

Couple these social web properties and the deal with Google with increased political spending in ’08 and the upcoming Olympics (Hearst-Argyle owns NBC affiliate stations), and the picture is quite rosy for the company.

Don’t overlook companies such as Hearst when discussing the future of media or social media… they could be pointing to the future of media attention and spending.

I talk alot about widgets here (for good reason), and it seems that 2007 has lived up to its name of “The Year of the Widget.”

Here’s an interesting piece on a small company that made it big with a little help from the widget:

SAN FRANCISCO — For nearly a decade, GarageBand.com was the quintessential struggling Web company, barely hanging on as it burned through $17 million.

Until widgets.

Since it developed a widget, one of the mini-Web applications now flourishing on Facebook and other social-networking sites, the company — renamed iLike — has become an overnight sensation.

USA TODAY – Widgets Make a Big Splash on the Net

John Gruber tweeted a great and intriguing thought tonight…

 

Almost a year ago, I responded to a ZDNet post calling TinyURL the "next YouTube" (saying that was a ludicrous proposition):

I can’t speak for Doc, but I don’t think he would agree that TinyURL is a stealth intention engine. It’s a way to send links without taking up too much space. It’s not YouTube. It’s not an intention engine. It’s not an attention engine. Simply put, it’s a useful tool, but it’s one that is quickly becoming obselete as the intention architecture of the web as we know it continues to change. 

After a year of using Twitter, I have to admit that I wish there was a URL shortening service that I knew would be around for years and years since my tweets are being indexed and I would love for the links there to continue to point to their intended targets for perpetuity.  Using TinyURL or any of the other URL shortening services is putting a great deal of hope and faith in their longevity and good intentions.

So, while I still don’t think TinyURL is the next YouTube, I think John may be on to something… a URL shortening service from a major player would be more than welcome for those us confining our thoughts (and intentions) into 140 characters on an hourly basis.

Twitter / John Gruber: I wish Google offered a URL…

Magnify.net is one of the most interesting places on the web if you’re int video, aggregation or user generated content.

They’re announcing a new video blogging platform today to be led by a daily show from one of my favorite online people, Chris Brogan.

NEW YORK – November 16, 2007 — Video Blogging goes mainstream with a new free service. Magnify.net today announced that they will enable anyone who is interested in video blogging to jump in, without needing a video camera, a deck or even web design software.

 Magnify.net is releasing to private beta, a new video blogger in a box toolset with an intuitive, plug-and-play Webcam capture tool that allows creators to build a Vlog page, put up all their own graphics and design elements. With just a webcam, their Vlog can go live. Magnify.net also offers stylish and slick templates to make the graphic design process drag-and-drop simple.

Podcamp co-founder and online media guru Chris Brogan will host a daily video blog called “Attention Upgrade” to showcase Magnify’s new platform during the private beta. Chris Brogan and Magnify.net are inviting others to request an invitation if they are interested in video blogging and providing feedback at privatebeta@magnify.net