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!
