still feel gone.
How To Use Twitter?
As I told my students when I taught middle school science… figure it out for yourself.
And so says this post. This is the best piece I’ve read on what Twitter means, doesn’t mean and how you should or should not use Twitter.
Untitled
still feel gone.
Revver Finally Acquired
Looks like video platform Revver has finally be acquired after months of shopping around for a buyer…
Google Testing Video Ads on SERPS
The New York Times is reporting that Google has started testing video ads within search result pages. The ads will be displayed only after a user clicks a small “plus sign” to expand a player which shows the commerical or movie trailer.
A Tale of Two Parties
Yes, We Can…
vs
No, You Can’t…
I still can’t believe I was fortunate enough to be in Columbia for what might become (and already is) one of the most important speeches and political moments in this new century. The line about “little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon” makes me tear up everytime I watch this given that I grew up about 20 mins from Dillon.
Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me to the “No You Can’t” vid.
Invalid Clicks: Whose Traffic Is It Anyway?
Adam Viener has an interesting post about CJ’s passing of expired links on to the merchant with no compensation for the affiliate, which differs from their previous practice of routing to a non-active page.
Adam raises the point that it would be nice to have a voice in this as it is “our traffic” that is being passed to the merchant through the network…
Wiseaff: Invalid Clicks – Affiliate Networks Can Do Better!: “In the past CJ used to link those bad links to a ‘No longer active page’, but appears to now pass the old expired link and traffic on to the merchant without compensation. I am not so sure how I fell about that personally. It makes it harder for me to identify bad links when I click on them, but can understand it’s a better user experience.
Honestly, I think that if they are not going to pay us for the traffic, than it should be up to the affiliate how this invalid traffic is passed, it might be nice to actually let us define a url where the traffic goes so we can track it and monetize it, after all it’s OUR TRAFFIC, not theirs.
I agree with Adam off the top of my head, but I think there are other implications for calling traffic “ours” in affiliate marketing… there’s some sort of proportional ratio behind traffic in my opinion. How much of a potential customer’s decision to follow an affiliate link comes from an affiliate’s site and how much comes from the merchant’s creative?
Nice piece, Adam. More of my thoughts soon…
Attention and the Web Worker (or Affiliate Marketer)
I waste too much time.
I know this, but I’ve been working on it. My time is pretty valuable and I’ve spread myself pretty thin between ReveNews, AffiliateFortuneCookies, GeekCast, this site, my affiliate sites, my consulting gigs… not to mention my baby, wife, family, dogs and Nascar watching.
Attention is a particular problem for people in the affiliate marketing industry because we don’t have one job where we work for one person.
One of my favorite web personalities is Merlin Mann (who I suggested as an Affiliate Summit keynote candidate), and his new vid hits on this attention problem.
So, this video is more aimed to general web workers, but it’s definitely appropriate for those of us in performance marketing:
(Via 43Folders.)
Better Metrics for Marketers Coming to YouTube
YouTube had a small event last night in which it unveiled some of the upcoming tweaks and improvements to its video platform. Included with better video editing tools and more distribution is this interesting tidbit…
What’s Next for YouTube (Video Editing, Recommendations, Advertiser Analytics): “—For marketers, the ‘real news was YouTube’s announcement of an impending launch of advanced analytics tools. You’ll be able to see where video views are coming from (geographically and site-wise), as well as many other data points. This will be a huge help to advertisers trying to extract more success metrics and data from their YouTube efforts.’”
Whether or not online marketers and advertisers will hop on the video bandwagon en masse in 2008 remains to be seen, but the addition of a more solids metrics program to a large video distribution platform like YouTube does point things in a pro-video direction.
GeekCast Episode 5: Cease and Desist
Lisa Picarille, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral and I taped another episode of GeekCast that was published yesterday. It’s a free-form and fun show where we discuss current trends in the geek marketing world ranging from tech to performance marketing.
[display_podcast]
This week, the gang tackles wearable video, fake Twitter-ers, master link baiters, affiliate link cloaking and Lost Geekend ’08. Give it a listen and let us know your thoughts.