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.
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Wiseaff: Invalid Clicks – Affiliate Networks Can Do Better!: “In the past CJ used to link those bad links to a ‘No longer active page’, but appears to now pass the old expired link and traffic on to the merchant without compensation.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…
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.)
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.
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.
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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.
Interesting piece on my favorite piece of web tech, Twitter, in the NY Times today:
If You Can’t Let Go, Twitter – New York Times: “Some day these people will get their own lives, and I’ll be able to pop out to buy ballet flats whenever I want. But until they do, I figured there had to be a more efficient way for me to keep in touch with all of them at once.
This was how I ended up signing up for a free account from Twitter, a group-messaging application that despite all the media attention it has received still hasn’t broken into the mainstream or become a to-die-for tool for the youngest early adopters. While some tech-savvy adherents use Twitter to ‘micro-blog’ from cellphones and BlackBerrys, as well as from computers, other digital natives like my teenage daughters and their friends have remained oblivious to its charms.”
sick for the first time in years. it’s terrible.
sick for the first time in years. it’s terrible.
If you’re doing video and using WordPress and YouTube, this is a really nifty plugin that alleviates some of the frustrations that people often have when they start embedding video into blog posts:
Smart Youtube – WordPress Plugins: “Smart Youtube is a WordPress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in both your post and in RSS feed. It is small, fast and does not depend on any external scripts.
The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Unlike other plugins the link to the video will also appear in your rss feed. And the best thing is, Smart Youtube will also display a preview screenshot of the video in your RSS feed.”
I’ve seen some pretty strange ideas for catching eyeballs over the years (RIP Mr. PopUp… we hardly knew ye), but I’m not even sure how to classify this: