From heaven Utu replied to him: “Young man, you are noble already in your own right — but what would you want with the mountains?”
Today is Wayne Porter‘s birthday. Everyone take a moment and wish him well and many more years of pushing the envelopes and pulling the virtual puppet strings.
If you’re in Chicago on June 9, this could be a “fun” talk to hear…
Affiliate Marketing: Far More Dangerous Than You Think: “For many years, Alan has been (and remains today) highly critical of the affiliate channel, so this promises to be a lively session!
Joining Alan on the panel will be Barbara Hurd, VP of Business Development, Harry and David; and Vicki Updike, VP of Merchandising and Marketing, Miles Kimball.
Affiliate fan or foe, come watch the fireworks!”
Or you could head over to the Oriental Institute at Univ of Chicago and ponder how, much like the consultants, false confidence in their own superiority (instead of developing better chariots) cost the Assyrian empire it’s position as a super power in the ancient near east. Both would accomplish the same thing.
Big news out of Linkshare today.
LinkShare Announces Executive Management Team Changes: “NEW YORK, March 18 /PRNewswire/ — LinkShare, a leading pay-per-action
marketing network, announced the resignation of Stephen R. Denton as
President of the company and two promotions in its executive management
team.”While a search for Denton’s replacement gets underway, his duties will
be assumed by John J-H Kim, who will become Interim President in addition
to his role as CEO of LinkShare’s parent company, Rakuten USA.
(As a side note, it’s always heartening to find this sort of thing on press release outlets instead of from a phone call… don’t you hire out very expensive PR firms? Thanks, networks).
The comment solution I use here at CostPerNews is called Disqus. It’s fantastic and the best of both worlds for building a community out of your commenters.
Today, Disqus is announcing a new funding round and a slew of new (and very cool) features that enhances the platform:
Disqus Blog » Disqus releases Beta 2 – New features, lots of bug fixes, improved performance: “Bloggers are some of the most opinionated and vocal people out there. So when creating a product for bloggers, expect them to significantly shape the thing every step of the way.
Disqus is very much such a product. Late last week, we release what we dubbed Beta 2. That’s the label we’re giving to one of the biggest Disqus updates in a long time. And credit goes to you, wonderful Disqus user, for all the help in improving your favorite discussion service.”
So what’s new?
For one the forum look-and-feel is gone and replaced by very nice “Community Pages.” Everything is much more coherently organized and easier to browse. You can see the CPN Comments Page here for an example.
Disqus is also making it easier for commenters to create their own profiles and add social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to that profile fairly easily. Since the crowd here tends to be the same commenters, this could be a neat feature for this particular blog and help you get some traffic to your other social networking spaces. That profile travels with you to other blogs that use Disqus.
There’s lots of additional goodness on the backend for blog owners that I won’t bore you with, but it’s easier to configure the look and feel of the place and easier to bake in the Disqus comments into the originating blog.
For example, the biggest request I had was for a “Recent Comments” widget that would display new comments here on the blog that were reflective of the forum. That’s baked in now, thank goodness.
So, if you’re a blogger and looking for something to spice the place up and bring in extra functionality for your readers and commenters, I highly suggest Disqus.
TechCrunch has coverage of Yahoo’s 3 year revenue growth plan (slides) and it’s pretty interesting to see their take on the future of web advertising (heavy on mobile and display) and how affiliate marketing fits in…
Kerri Pollard, GM of Commisson Junction, joins me in a special podcast.
We cover the Pepperjam controversy, CJ's perspective on the current status of affiliate marketing and where she sees the industry heading in the next decade (and whether or when CJ will blog).
The podcast runs about 25 minutes and is a must-listen.
On last Friday’s “Paying for Performance” podcast, Jeff Molander remarked that I’m rather bullish on AOL’s position in the online advertising market. I think with new president Lynda Clarizio in place, my optimism about them be proven true…
AOL Highlights Platform-A Integration Focus With Unified Search Marketing Services | paidContent.org: “AOL announced that Platform-A has combined contextual ad targeter Quigo’s FeedPoint search marketing tool with Advertising.com’s OutSearch data analysis product.
Secondly, the combination of the OutSearch’s “bid management solutions” for buying keywords and FeedPoint’s analytic tools, also highlights another recent area AOL hopes to be more active in: ecommerce. In February, AOL acquired UK-based affiliate marketing network Buy.at, which was intended to round out Platform-A’s ad network offerings with online sales and performance-based marketing solutions.
AOL has a tremendous amount of potential due to its reach into the global performance and display ad business, which is where Google is lacking (hence the DoubleClick acquisition). Add to that the existing long-term relationships that AOL has with global brands with deep pockets looking for more responsive and performance-based advertising, and AOL’s future looks bright.
It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of AOL from darling in the 90’s to pariah in the early ’00’s into global advertising powerhouse in the late ’00’s into the ’10’s. Keep your eye on AOL and its subsidiaries.
Is this potentially true for Performics as well?
Google Makes DoubleClick Employees Apply To Keep Their Jobs – Silicon Alley Insider: “Last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned DoubleClickers that Google still hadn’t decided how many (and which) of them to fire. Now, Google has reportedly ordered DoubleClickers to submit their resumes to a committee so Google can determine if they’re actually Google material.”
I hope not… lots of good folks over at Perfomics so hopefully there will be no blood-letting. There’s still speculation that Performics will get spun off since Google doesn’t want to double dip in the SEO space, but I don’t see that happening.
Azoogle’s Don Mathis gives their elevator pitch at AlwaysOn…
Azoogle | AlwaysOn: “AzoogleAds, founded in 2000, is an end-to-end online marketing solutions provider for advertisers, publishers and online affiliates. Initially a pioneer in performance-based marketing, AzoogleAds generates the highest volumes of quality traffic through its affiliate network, its proprietary search technologies and optimization, and its in-house CPM/CPA/CPC Media Buying.”
Head over there to watch the short video. Interesting to hear Azoogle’s take on performance advertising and how they see it as the future of all online advertising, especially CPA.
This morning, eBay is announcing that they are moving their affiliate program in house to the eBay Partner Network effective April 1, 2008 (no fool’s day joke). eBay is also bringing Half.com over to the new network. Affiliates and publishers need to have links changed over by May 1, 2008.
Of course, this means that eBay is leaving Commission Junction as its affiliate network platform. This is a blow against CJ in terms of a solid long lasting program with significant revenues and strong brand name in a month where CJ is already wrapped up in a PR food fight with Pepperjam Network.
With over 60,000 affiliates here in the United States and 100,000 affiliates worldwide, eBay is a significant powerhouse in the affiliate marketing world. So why the move?
I spoke to the Senior Manager of the eBay affiliate program, Will Martin-Gill, and he emphasized that the move had nothing to do with a dissatisfaction with CJ or ValueClick.
Instead, Martin-Gill said it was time to bring the affiliate program in-house the same way eBay brought their search services in-houe a couple of yeas ago. Martin-Gill told me eBay is also looking to build in more flexibility and innovation into their program to reach and sustain the more diverse crowd of affiliates and publishers on the web today and to have a direct relationship with those affiliates (key point, I believe). In short, eBay wants more control over data and wants to be able to coordinate across marketing channels.
Martin-Gill said the international factor was also a major reason for the move away from CJ to in-house managing of the affiliate program. eBay is looking to turn its program into a global platform where publishers and affiliates can sign up to all the various country-specific programs at once through the same interface.
Shopping API’s and eventually RSS will be implemented into the program as well as in-depth reporting.
I also spoke with ValueClick VP John Ardis and CJ’s Dave Osmond on Friday about eBay’s departure. They emphasized the mutual good will on both sides and said the move was not a surprise, but something that CJ had been working with eBay on for the last couple of years realizing the needs that eBay had for their affiliate program.
Ardis also pointed out that eBay is not severing all ties with ValueClick or Commission Junction since VC’s Mediaplex tracking solution is being used for the eBay Publisher Network and Tradera AB, ProStores, Reseller Marketplace, Media Marketplace, eBay Stores and StubHub will continue to be on the CJ platform.
This is certainly a major development and could signal a sea change for the place of the networks in the affiliate marketing world. We’ll have to see how affiliates and merchants respond to the news.