Sam Harrelson

During his “Lighting Round” picks last night (December 12), CNBC’s popular stock analyst and personality Jim Cramer included a short quip about two of online advertising’s biggest players…

aQuantive (AQNT): ‘AQNT and VCLK … These are companies that help the digital media transformation.’
ValueClick (VCLK): ‘These are companies that are beneficiaries of the fact that TV and radio and newspapers are losing… they’re winning.’

His comment on Cisco during that same segment was also interesting…

Cisco (CSCO): ‘ They’re best in show.’

I was hoping for more detail from him on his predictions for ValueClick. Their stock continues to soar after a downturn in July. They are attracting more and more attention as online advertising continues to eat into the once hegemonic grip of traditional styles of marketing and show increasing signs of ROI and flexibility.

Could this be signs of a major acquisition in the space in near future?

[Disclosure: I do not own stock in any of the companies above and this is opinionated commentary, not advice on stocks that you should purchase. ]

The Washington Post reports that the FTC is getting involved in the PayPerPost debacle…

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

In a staff opinion issued yesterday, the consumer protection agency weighed in for the first time on the practice. Though no accurate figures exist on how much money advertisers spend on such marketing, it is quickly becoming a preferred method for reaching consumers who are skeptical of other forms of advertising.

Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.

In my opinion, this should be a self-regulating and self-cleaning mechanism built into the world of online marketing. We should have the ability, and the foresight, to see these types of marketing schemes for what they are… manipulation marketing.

However, considering how vocal some “marketers” are about sketchy practices such as AdSense arbitrage, splogs, and the the inability of reason and the common good to control the market for the benefit of everyone, it seems that the FTC has to get involved to reign in the craziness. Pay per content schemes, whether they be explicit or tacit are not healthy for the blogging scheme, and do not provide bloggers and individuals with a long term sustainable way to make a living.

Provide good content, write about what you love and the traffic will come. You don’t need high stakes SEO or short term pay per post schemes to make a dollar, or an impact, in the blogging world.

So what does this mean for affiliate marketing?

Are links dead?

Jason Calacanis’ keynote from this year’s Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is worth a listen or two. Done in an interview style with Danny Sullivan, the keynote has been made famous for it’s “SEO is bullshit” declaration. While that is an interesting point to ponder, some of the other statements Jason made caught my attention as well. For example, near the end he says that his personal motto might be “make it suck less” in terms of internet platforms and programs.

Here’s the link to the interview in mp3 (made available by WebMasterRadio).

Jason got me thinking about my recent launch of CostPerJobs. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into the backend of the site and service, and I hope it shows when the site makes its formal Debutante Ball appearance (I’m from South Carolina where we still have such things).

When the formal interface makes its debut, I want the site to be something useful. I’m not as interested in monetizing the site as many people in the industry tell me I should be, but I’ve often considered job listings and helping connect people or businesses needing quality help with the people in online marketing who could provide that quality as lacking. Having been in the position of trying to find the next forward thinking company from an employee point-of-view, I know that it is lacking.

So, in order to make CostPerJobs suck less (even though you won’t see the completed project until Friday), I’d like for your help/input/insight into the following questions or any other topics you can think of to make this a valuable resource for our community:

• Should I charge a fee for listings or make it a free service?
• What features would you like to see on CostPerJobs (RSS, email subscriptions, keyword searching, etc)?
• Should CostPerJobs look like CostPerNews or should it have its own distinctive appearance and interface?
• How much of a role should automation play?
• How could this site best be utilized for the improvement of our community?

Please share your feedback. I’m not interested in making millions or thousands off of the site, but I do want it to serve as a needed resource in our industry and community.

Come to think of it, use this as a chance to tell me how to make CostPerNews suck less. If there’s something you don’t like about the site, or something you wish was here, don’t hesitate to post it in the comments or send me an email.

Thanks so much!

This is not too surprising in my book judging from the popularity of platforms such as GMail, feed readers, social bookmarking sites and social networks…

Fifty-seven percent of 1,100 surveyed respondents said they would provide demographic information in exchange for a more personalized online experience, and 34 percent of respondents said they would allow sites to track their clicks and purchases.

What do you think?

(Thanks to Jeff Doak for the tip.)

Google blogger Matt Cutts has responded to criticism that Google blatantly ripped off a Yahoo promotion page for the download of IE7 in a blistering detail of how Yahoo has taken liberally from Google’s own AdSense templates in the design of their own promotional ads…

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

However, this situation points to something endemic to our current American society based on our cookie-cutter educational institutions which are producing citizens with the skills to know how to cut and paste rather well without the ability to think creatively and critically. This sort of copying occurs more than frequently in affiliate marketing, whether it’s campaign creative, network interfaces or promotional materials. So, let’s all use this as a reason to look at our own programs and discover how we might be able to do something a little differently than how everyone else is doing, whatever your rank in online marketing.

Both of these companies are stocked full of highly intelligent engineers and designers, so let’s all shake hands and go our separate ways making the web more Ajaxy…

Following Anik’s (from AffiliateClassroom.com) lead, I made an ornament out of the thoughtful Season’s Greetings card from Shawn Collins. The making of the ornament involved a scissor hack which modified the card beyond its terms of use, but the placement which the ornament will receive is of much higher quality and traffic than the card would ever get based on all of those other non-relevant contextual cards.

I’ve added the “ornament” to our Harrelson Family Holiday Chair…

And here’s the closeup of the newly added Shawn Collins ornament (along with C3PO)…

Do you send out a Holiday note to your partners? You should. Shawn’s package made my day and as a result I’m subconsciously more willing to do more business with him in 2007. Don’t underestimate the power of the Holiday Card!

And now for the important question…what did YOU do with your Shawn Collins Christmas Package?

My beautiful wife and I are contemplating the idea of having a baby in 2007, so the story of James Kim and his family’s ordeals still brings a river of tears to my eyes, even as I write this post.

My wife is a physician and spends an inordinate amount of time working in the hospital, so when we went out to dinner last Wednesday at our favorite restaurant here in Asheville, she had not heard about the Kim family ordeal and the discovery of James’ body as he was attempting to travel in the bitter cold of an Oregon winter to find help for his family.  As I tried to relate the story to her over our noodles and vegetables, I broke down thinking about one of our own tech-savvy colleagues and the ordeals he and his family must have gone through during those cold and lonely nights stranded in the wilderness.

I’ve been trying to find a way to donate or give something to the Kim family during the Holidays in order that these emotions and feelings of empathy might not go away in vain.  A friend passed along this link to jamesandkati.com.

If you would like to forward on words of hope and encouragement to the Kim and Fleming families please send a note to friendsandfamily@jamesandkati.com and we will gather them up to pass on. Please send an email with your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate all of the thoughts and prayers and will pass along emails to the Kim and Fleming families. We will also be creating a time capsule for the girls, so that in their future they will know what a great man and a hero James was to his family. The capsule will include these emails, examples of James work at TechTV and CNet, and news reports about their dad.

So in the midst of all of our crass commercialization during the Holidays, please consider visiting the site and using the PayPal option to donate funds to the Kim family.  Send along the link and let others know that they can donate to the family there as well.

The Google Strikes Back.

Jason Calacanis spotted this comment from Matt Cutts regarding Google’s detection and devaluation of paidperpost content in Google rankings…

“Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”

So if you want to keep your prestige (and ranking / rating) with Google, you might want to re-evaluate the use of PayPerPost and ReviewMe type offers.

Some would argue about the issue of fairness, but in the free market economy of the WWW, Google can and should be able to set whatever policies it sees fit being in the dominant share of the market for user trustworthiness.

I suspect Yahoo and MSN do the same with regards to paid content such as PaidPerPost but have been waiting on word from Google to make their own declarations about these emerging platforms.

Video has matured from a realm of amateur user generated content into a platform for compelling online media according to a new whitepaper from Universal McCan and KnowledgeStorm.  Of the 5,300 technology and B2B buyers surveyed in the study, over 60% said that they accessed video on a daily basis for the purpose of business and not entertainment.

“The takeaway of all of these surveys is that we are really in stage two of the opportunity for online marketing and advertising,” said Matt Lohman, KnowledgeStorm’s director of market research. “There is a whole wave of opportunity to extend marketing campaigns and programs via things like blogs, podcasts and various video formats. The sky’s the limit in terms of the ways to be effective on the Internet and really measure results. This stuff is not a fad that’s going away.”

Of the three topics explored in the latest survey, video is making the broadest impact today. More than 63% of respondents access video at least weekly, while the same percentage said they access video primarily for business and technology information?not entertainment. Webcasting was the most commonly accessed form of Web video at 70%, but all sorts of types scored well. Overall, 78.1% of respondents said video “makes online content more compelling,” while 57% said video content had influenced a b-to-b technology buying decision.

I found it interesting that video had such a high rate of adoption in the B2B community already.  In this case, it seems that the B2C community may be behind the B2B crowd in terms of adoption of video as a viable and valuable platform because B2C still seems to be sorting out the evolving and rapidly growing space and trying to determine a proper metric and even place for advertisements on the platform.

Nevertheless, expect for video to blossom in 2007.

Wired News has a full length feature on the rising prominence of RSS and feed subscriptions within the platforms of shopping aggregations sites such as Mpire, Offertrax and StyleFeeder.

The extensive use of RSS technology shows that these shopping sites are consciously moving away from traditional methods of communication like e-mail, which has become less reliable for alerting users to money-saving deals.

As Offertrax’s Carcio points out, e-mail has been so badly abused by spammers that RSS, blogs, opt-in offers and other “user-controlled technologies” will soon become the most effective way for sellers to reach out to interested buyers.

With the continued devaluation of email’s effectiveness in the face of growing consumer mobile texting and instant message usage and the Hobbesian state of most people’s inboxes due to spam and spoofs, it is little wonder that these major shopping portals are turning to subscription feeds such as RSS and Atom. Such feeds are easily transportable in an offline environment and allow consumers the chance to receive the information they are seeking in a quick, clean and pain-free environment. Placing your latest coupon or product discount in a user’s email inbox alongside the deluge of spam and garbage does harm to your own brand as well.

With the implementation of RSS in IE7 and Vista, will the scale finally tip towards a feed based nature of online conversation? Has your program taken steps to make this transition an easy and profitable one?

I’m excited to announce that CostPerJobs is launching tonight.

CostPerJobs is in a very scaled down mode until this Friday when the full GUI will be available after more testing, but the basic nuts and bolts are up and available for your use.

Best of all, listings are only $25 per month until the end of December. After the beginning of the New Year the rates will go higher. Also, the most recent job listings will be featured on a widget here on the front page of CostPerNews. So you’re getting exposure to the thousands of online marketing and affiliate marketing professionals who visit CostPerNews each day.

So, give it a spin and see what you think. Let me know if you have any ideas or things that you’d like to see in the full GUI release on Friday as it’s not to late to make a few changes there.

Oh, and the first company to make a listing gets a free 125×125 banner spot here on the main page for a week (valued at $125).

From the Google Checkout blog…

Starting today, merchants will be able to use existing affiliate tracking and analytics tools for sales through Google Checkout. You can now include a pixel URL with parameters in the cart post and it will be included on the Checkout Thank You page. You’ll also be able to include placeholders for dynamic variables that will be populated before calling the URL. For more details, refer to third-party conversion tracking in the Google Checkout API documentation.

And here are more technical details on Google’s support for third party conversion tracking.

Quick fix or long term solution?

Tag Bulb is a new search engine which allows you to search for specific tags across various platforms such as Flickr, Riya, YouTube, Webshots, Google, Technorati, Ma.gnolia, Amazon and a host of other social media sites which rely on tags for organization.

Tags are increasingly becoming a hot topic in the world of online marketing. The first company to realize a meaningful way to monetize a user’s input or preferences based on a tagging scheme and apply that (in a meaningful and non-scum fashion) will endear themselves to many of the Fortune 500 who are scratching their heads over this whole web2.0 thing.

The world of online marketing is slowly shifting away from a links based hierarchy to a tag based attention economy (see TechMeme and Tailrank). Understanding tags and how they can impact your program will definitely place you a notch above your competitors.

As a reminder, if you see an interesting story, blog post or article that you’d like to discuss further here on CostPerNews, simply tag it with “costpernews” on either the del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com social bookmarking services. Quite a few of you have already taken advantage of that, and I hope more of you will!

On a side note, I’ve switched feeds back to full text from partial text.

I know this is not popular with many of my fellow bloggers in the online marketing space, but I’m can’t justify restricting access to content either on the site or on the feed.

Personally, I hate partial feeds and rarely, if ever, follow the jump from my Google Reader. So I’m making this change for my own tastes. I hope you as readers have similar tastes. I have a feeling most of you do, and I don’t want to punish those of you who have taken the time to subscribe to the feed just to stem the tide of the splogs and aggregators who scrape content.

Here is the CostPerNews feed if you haven’t subscribed yet:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CostPerNews

Thanks for your attention, readership, comments, emails and well-wishes that have help to make CostPerNews such a success so soon. Here’s to a great Holiday season for all of us!

The widget over to the right which displays some of the faces of visitors to this site is powered by MyBlogLog. That widget has helped me to realize some new things about the future of online marketing and the growing power that community has in ad expenditures. Viewers are able to make their presence known by a simple sign up and pic upload process, and then see who else is reading and interacting with a blog such as this.

If you click on the “View Reader Community” text at the bottom of the widget, you are taken to the Cost Per News Reader Community where (at the moment 19) readers have added themselves as a part of the community. These are the dedicated and loyal readers of the site that have also added the most comments, sent the most emails and have genuinely made this a valuable community to be a part of. Size matters not in such a community, as quality is the main metric which should be achieved. This is exactly the type of tool I was looking to find and make an active part of CostPerNews since the site was created.

For example, viewership of the site has skyrocketed since I installed the widget in early October. My analytics have also shown me that since that time the number of page views, time spent on the site, links in from other blogs and the general word of mouth about CostPerNews have all grown exponentially. Not all of the credit can be given to the MyBlogLog widget of course, but my stats point to a good correlation between implementation and site growth, activity and value to both myself and the readers.

The MyBlogLog widget has caught on in our sector of online marketing and in the online world in general. Blogs such as ReveNews and TechCrunch have implemented the widget, allowing you a brief mugshot on sites such as this which serves as a positive for both the reader and the site owner… you are given brief exposure as a reader of a similar blog to other potential business partners, and the site owner is able to qualify and quantify their readership. I’d be interested in hearing how the widget has affected those sites in terms of metrics such as page viewership and time spent on the site.

Even the folks at MyBlogLog seemed surprised at the growth of their site due to the widget…

On 30-Oct, I was surprised and happy with our widget stats. How little I knew. Now there’s 2,398 Recent Readers widgets installed (vs. 1,325 then). And, yesterday was our first million widget day. i.e. a million of our widgets were loaded into web pages. That’s a bit over 9% of the 10.2 million pages (also a record!) that we tracked through the system yesterday. It’s somewhat under 10% as a few pages have both widgets. Thank you all!

What does this have to do with affiliate marketing and online marketing? Everything. A month ago (today) I made a post titled Widgets and the Future of Affiliate Marketing in which I spelled out many of the sentiments that are resurfacing in this post:

Similarly, affiliate marketing in general (from the mom-and-pop sites up to the large loyalty sites) could see such a transformation if a 3rd party platform was made available to the industry. What would spur this metamorphosis? Limitations of scaling.

Providing a platform for delivering personalized data based on registrations in exchange for a piece of generated advertising revenue sounds very much like the model which most affiliate and CPA networks already operate under. That is no accident, because serving widgets and serving ads (particularly customized ads based on user choices and user registrations) have more in common than anyone in the affiliate marketing world has taken time to notice.

However, let’s move beyond those models which still enforce that top-down dictation model and focus on models (like widgets) that produce a back and forth between user and affiliate site. That’s where affiliate marketing shines, and that’s the promise that widgets specifically have for pushing certain parts of the industry in the right direction.

The link is dead. Content customization based on a relationship (even as simple as user registration or co-registration) and micro-systems of delivery of that content is the new black. Affiliate marketing, with its ability to make relationships, has a great opportunity to make use of widgets and widget delivery to set the larger industry standard.

In this mode of widget usage, scalability is not a detriment to affiliate marketing. Rather than adhering to that long held belief that the non-scalability of affiliate marketing is what’s holding the industry back from the major leagues, realizing that new platforms (such as widgets) provide a way for affiliates and networks to utilize the relationship factor as a positive… an incredibly profitable and long-term solution positive.

This silent revolution has already begun. It is spreading on the medium of widgets like tiny pieces of energy combining to form a tidal wave in the medium of water. Don’t discount the ability of widgets and user interaction in your affiliate and online marketing program.

Keeping with the fashion analogy, relationship is the new color for 2007. Widgets, such as the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget, function as a platform and sounding board for realizing the increasing power of voice in the online world. Has your program, site, network or even arbitrage site (joke) tapped into the value of community empowerment?

Lorelle VanFossen has compiled a list of posts on other blogs which describe some of these quiet changes which are slowly spreading across the landscape of online marketing which serve as a great resource for further reading…

• Micro Persuasion – The Imminent Demise of the Page View
• Marketing VOX – Ajax May Undermine Web Advertising Analytics Models
• TechWeb – Ajax Challenges Web Development Leaders — And Web Publishers And Advertisers
• Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Five Ecosystem Challenges for Web Analytics Vendors
• Emergence Media – The Future of Analytics and the Fate of Page Centricity
• Weekly Weblog – Page View, Useless?
• The Blog Herald – Where is Online Advertising Heading?
• Cost Per News – Transcending Links in Affiliate Marketing
• ProBlogger – The Death of the Page View and the Ongoing Challenge of Monetizing Websites

What do you think?

Dave at the Affiliate Programs Blog made an interesting post about reaching terminal velocity with social networks…

“I love social networks, I truly do. I use nearly all of the top services on a regular basis, from Digg, Delicious, Newsvine, Myspace, LinkedIn, and others. I’m actively participating in over 10 social networks in one way or another (and I’m not counting forums that I participate on or email lists I belong to). But in all reality, I’m reaching a social networking terminal velocity.”

The phenomenon of social networking has certainly spread into the everyday existence of affiliate and online marketers.  Rarely are contacts or potential partners not available for linking on a platform such as LinkedIn or MySpace.  Many marketers are also pointing to RepVine as a potential place for finding contacts and keeping in touch.

However, in reality what sort of business or potential business deals are done on these networking sites?  Are they worth the time invested in terms of realized actions that result from participating?  How has your program or site benefited from participating on LinkedIn or MySpace or RepVine?

TechCrunch and others are reporting that

Metacafe, the video sharing site, is reportedly being sold for between $200-300 million. The buyer is currently unknown but there is speculation that it may be Yahoo.

This makes good sense for Yahoo as a compliment to their other social web sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. Metacafe blends the ease of YouTube with the social strategy of Fark, enabling contributors and visitors to sort through videos made popular by users.

Yahoo would also be able to utilize the service in its advertising platform as well. Many of the business-centric viral videos that don’t find success on YouTube are spread through Metacafe. Video is an area that Yahoo is lagging behind in, and a purchase of a platform such as Metacafe would help Yahoo in its catch-up play to Google.

2007 continues to shape up as the year of the acquisition.

Reuters is reporting that Time Warner is seeking to purchase an online ad unit to bolster their new emphasis on advertising rather than the subscription model of revenue for their AOL division.

“We are looking for horizontal opportunities to strengthen our position in the advertising space,” Parsons said at the Credit Suisse media and telecom conference in New York.

Who fits the bill for this?   First, the size requirement.  Is AOL thinking a Madison Ave sized online ad company, a ValueClick sized company or something along the lines of ShareASale or Azoogle?

Asked by the moderator if there were any “size limitations” to its potential acquisition targets, Parsons said, “No. Almost anything you could think of other than the really big, established portals is within striking distance for us.”

To me, this signals AOL is looking at properties outside their normal range.  However, the network AOL would acquire would have to be broad enough to supply enough reach and impressions, without much increased funding, to fit the market need.

It still seems early in the process, but this snippet also gives more clues…

He declined to specify which companies it will consider. But he told Reuters in an interview last week that Time Warner is looking at so-called ad insertion technology that lets companies place ads that are relevant to a particular viewer’s tastes.

This sounds more along the lines of a rich media entity rather than a pay per performance or affiliate network, or at least a network or media company with the ability to provide both horizontal reach and multimedia tracking such as by a video unit.

Maybe it is ValueClick?

What about Advertising.com?

I just did a post over on ReveNews about an infection on a laptop running Ubuntu (a Linux OS) that I’ve suffered tonight, potentially via following links from a CPA Network.

Head over there to read and see screen pics.

1. Monetized the eyeball and provided the foundation for the translation of the CPM metric from an offline entity to an online model. That eventually evolved into a CPC then CPA as performance crept into the metric, thereby transforming advertising both online and eventually offline in a reciprocal fashion.

2. Provided the basis of the social web and web2.0 as we know it by helping companies and marketers understand the need for fluid interaction with individuals and potential consumers.

Jim Kukral has launched a unique tool to promote Forge Corporation’s BlogKits platform. BlogKits, an AdSense rival, is being promoted as a more efficient and easier way for bloggers to earn money compared to AdSense.

From the site:

Adsense doesn’t work for bloggers, yes, we know, such a bold statement… But it’s true!

1. Low-traffic blogs will never make more than pennies per day
2. One sale from BlogKits could bring you a week’s worth of click $$$ from Adsense

The tool is an AdSense comparison engine based on the amount of traffic a blog receives. The information shown is calculated based upon research and polls, taken from a sample of web users anonymously over a period of two years. The comparison engine is an interesting facilitation of a call-to-action sign up process for bloggers.

Will this have widespread adoption or offer bloggers a better chance to monetize their content compared to AdSense, Performancing’s platform or a pay per post model?

Cable and blogs are reporting that James Kim’s body has been found in the Oregon wilderness after he set out to find help for his stranded family on Saturday.

James was an editor at CNet and widely known and respected in the tech industry.

Our thoughts certainly go out to his family and the CNet family as well.

Spyware, malware, social memetic and all around universal researcher Wayne Porter was intrigued by attacks by the Second Life Liberation Army on advertising entities within Second Life such as the new Reebok Store.

Believe it or not, this mini-microcosm of over a million early adoption, hi-tech and attentive users does have implications for online marketing. The struggles, issues and situations being worked out on platforms such as Second Life or Digg will ripple out and help determine the shape of user interaction on the web as the online world (including the marketing part) continues to evolve.

The group’s site includes the following statement:

The SLLA’s demands are simple:

“The establishement of basic ‘rights’ for Second Life Players. Having consulted widely we now believe the best vehicle for this is for Linden Labs to offer public shares in the company. We propose that each player is able to buy one share for a set-price. This would serve both the development of the world and provide the beginnings of representation for avatars in Second Life.”

Porter actually found the leader of the clandestine and secretive group and interviewed them on their motives, intentions and general philosophy. They admit to attacks and defending avatar rights by claim not responsible for grey goo attacks which have led to a crippling of some parts of the Second Life economy, and given skeptics of the platform ample fodder for ridicule.

Interesting questions are asked at the end of the interview which do have some connection to the
“cost per” economy that online marketing has created such as: “Even in this new and incredible terrain are we destined to walk down the very same paths we have for centuries?”

Interview on Digg

Interview on ReveNews

Interview on wayneporter.com

Thomas from eBags sent this over to me by email earlier. Thoughts?…

eBags & Google Checkout

“The current eBags promotion with Google Checkout has proven to be a huge success. Although Google Checkout orders are not currently being properly reflected in CJ, please rest assured we are tracking each and every sale internally and can attribute these sales to all of our publishers.

We will be crediting every affiliate with the commission due to them from Google Checkout orders so no-one should think they are not getting proper credit for any referrals that use Google Checkout.

Our Account Managers at CJ are aware that we are tracking these orders and we are working out a means to reflect in the CJ system.

Our affiliates are on track to have record months of sales and commissions. We are one of only a small handful of merchants that Google has chosen to offer a $20 off $50 incentive that can be combined with other discounts and our affiliates have the ability to leverage and be fully compensated. We are confident that the affiliates that promote eBags during this holiday season will be pleasantly rewarded and taken care of by our team.

If anyone has any further questions or concerns regarding the eBags affiliate program, and Google Checkout orders please feel free to e-mail me at Thomas@ebags.com.

We look forward to finishing a strong holiday with our partners.”

If any other merchants, networks or affiliates would like to have their positions posted, email me your responses and I’ll post them.

PrimeQ has expanded its geography of business to include the Russian market with the announcement that it had opened an office in St. Petersburg, Russia to augment its growing European branch headquartered in London. PrimeQ is mostly known in online marketing for its registration path offers and technology services.

Jason McClain, PrimeQ’s founder and CEO, writes:

“After years of studying and preparing for the Russian market, we are proud to spearhead a drive into a largely untapped online environment that will grow leaps and bounds over the next decade,” said McClain. “The number of Russian internet users is currently the same as the UK, approximately 28 million people and, in a few years, will be double that of Britain.”