Category: Marketing

This just hit the wires… huge news in the affiliate marketing world and solidifies AOL’s place as an ad network to be reckoned with…

AOL buys online affiliate marketing network buy.at | Technology | Reuters: “NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc’s AOL said on Tuesday it has purchased online affiliate marketing network buy.at as part of a strategy to bolster its Internet advertising operations.

AOL did not disclose financial terms.

Buy.at is a network in which advertisers pay Web publishers that belong to the network only when a visitor to the site takes an action, such as making a purchase.”

It’s no secret that AOL has been re-aligning itself to take advantage of its stout advertising inventory within its own network. However, this acquisition points towards a possible route for AOL to also begin to provide advertising (most likely display given buy.at’s strengths) for 3rd party sites outside the AOL web family.

I’ve got calls in for a couple of interviews, so more soon…

(Via Reuters.)

Performics has released a series of upgrades and usability improvements to its reporting platform, ConnectCommerce this week.

Primarily, the updates focused on an improved links interface, advertiser profile interface, enhanced site description for publisher profiles and more accurate accounting reports.

Here’s a screen shot of the new links interface which is a drastic improvement over the old system. Instead of having to drill down layer by layer, the newest links from the network are shown by default and results can be narrowed by a series of available parameters.

The advertisers tab and interface is also improved in this version and allows for better sorting based on user preferences and categories of offers:

These categories act something like tags and allow for much more fluid and intuitive stat browsing:

As the current dust-up over affiliate network user interfaces has shown, there is a market demand for easier navigation, more options and less need to needlessly drill down for stats, banners or links that should be much easier to find.

At the end of the day, this is all about efficiency. The network that can provide the best offer and the best payout was always the winner in the past. However, that paradigm is slowly changing to include the network that has the best user experience and will continue to do so as networks assert their necessity of place in the market.

The circle is complete and Think Partnership (who acquired Kowabunga!) has rebranded itself as Kowabunga!.

Hi Sam,

I have some very exciting information to share with you about our Company.

We are announcing today that Think Partnership will now be doing business as Kowabunga!.

We decided that we needed a company name that more accurately reflects our leading position in the market and conveys the energy, spirit of innovation and excitement we share as an organization. We believe that Kowabunga!, which many of our participating advertisers and affiliates will also recognize as the name of our popular CPA subsidiary, is the perfect name to express our passion and conviction for performance based marketing solutions. When we say Kowabunga!, we think performance and technology, and we mean it.

Our company’s mission is to be the world’s best performance marketing solutions provider, a goal that we believe can be achieved through our strong mix of brands and innovative products and technologies, a good example of which is our recently launched ValidClick AdExchange. I encourage you to learn more about the many ways we can work with you to meet your marketing and advertising objectives.

Sincerely,

Scott P. Mitchell
President and CEO

There’s also a new website design to go along with the rebranding.

Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson expound on web celebs, affiliate network interfaces, iJustine and Jim's GuyLights (about an hour)

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=Pce935ca9e5e04f773c5773d674d6ba6cYl9wRVREYmd9&buffer=5&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap28

Download the MP3 File

Show Notes

– TechCrunch Presidential Endorsements: TechCrunch
– Spammer Sam: CostPerNews
– ShowYourAdHere.com: 45n5
– Shawn in Middle of CJ/Pepperjam Spat: Pepperjam Blog
– Super Affiliates For Sale: Affiliate Summit Blog
– Zac Johnson Doing it Right: Zac Johnson’s Blog
– Jim is a Twitter Hater: Jim Kukral’s Blog
– Affiliate Summit Exhibitors Are Missing Out (By Not Doing Video)

Visit GeekCast.fm for More Great Geek Marketing Podcasts!

Forget the age old CPA networks vs affiliate networks argument.

What about CPA vs CPC? That argument stirs up fun fighting words.

Aaron Goldman has an interesting piece on SearchInsider about this issue and the potential for macroeconomic trends to have a very real impact on the search and direct response industries:

Will CPA Get its Day?

There are a couple macro trends that lead me to believe a move to CPA might be in the cards. The first is consolidation in the space. For the first time, each of the Big 3 owns reputable ad serving technology. Not only does this provide access to conversion activity, but it delivers more reliable data that marketers will accept for billing purposes. The second is a movement toward transparency that’s pervading all facets of the marketing landscape. The inherent conflicts within GoogleClick, MicQuantive, and YahRightMedia demand a level of transparency heretofore unseen in the search space. There is simply no more transparent pricing model than CPA.

My take is that it is clear that marketers across the board have yet to realize the impact that CPA can have on the overall market economy given the reliance of more and more web2.0, mobile, video or social platforms on response instead of click or impression.

Clearly, there’s a need for improved and evolved metrics in online marketing. I think CPA could be hinting at the possible future of all online advertising and marketing.

Thoughts?

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