Thinking about the iPhone

I saw the the web cast of the event where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, now nearly six months ago. At that time, I wanted to buy it right away if I could, but it seems now that Apple did the wrong thing by announcing the iPhone so ahead of it’s actual launch date.

The “reality distortion field” has begun to fade and i don’t want an iPhone any more - not unless the iPhone has something truly ground breaking feature that my PDA phone does not have, and such a thing, if the iPhone has it, wasn’t announced back in January.

I don’t think I am going to buy an iPhone next year when it comes to this part of the planet.

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Google deleting Adsense Arbitragers’ Acounts!

I was just catching up with my RSS feeds that I hadn’t read since a couple of days, and to my surprise, Techmeme, and many internet marketing blogs are talking about Google and that they are in the process of deactivating adsense accounts of arbitragers!

It’s good to know that one may now be able to click on an adwords ad one is interested in without possibly being caught in an endless loop of ad-clicking.

Kudos to Google for the move!

Shows that google is begining to think long-term and trying to retain advertisers who need quality traffic from genuine sources. Can we now please see a similar crackdown on made for adsense sites that use organic SEO spamming next?

Read more on:
Earners Blog , Affiliate Fortune Cookies, Jensense, Shoemoney

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Presenting: The all new Google. Now with 20% extra search!

Today, at invite-only searchology event at Google headquarters, Google has announced some huge changes that are being made to the world’s #1 Internet search engine.

The new and improved google is being called “Universal search” Search results for books, local, video, news and images are now integrated right into the main google interface.

Checkout the full coverage of this by the blogosphere here (link to techmeme)

(image from techcrunch)

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Affiliate marketing? Get a fortune cookie at Sam’s new blog

Sam Harrelson, publisher of popular internet marketing blog Cost per news and CEO of PlanetBeta has just launched a brand new online publication for affiliate marketers at Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Affiliate Fortune cookies is a “affiliate marketing tip/hack/tricks blog” that aims at “lowering the currently high threshold that keeps many people out of our industry.” - how this will be done, is explained in the blog’s first first post:

Affiliate Fortune Cookies is a blog where we’re going to be throwing out quick and easy tips, tricks and hacks to help out both newbie’s and old pro’s alike.

So, the experience level required to understand posts will range from absolutely none to fairly advanced understanding of algo’s and CJ inner workings. However, there will be something here for every affiliate marketer looking to stay up on the latest tips.

Definitely a blog I recommend subscribing to, I have already subscribed and placed it among the first blogs I read in my netvibes page. If you are an Affiliate-manager, I also recommend advertising on AFC, it’s only $250 for 2 months, and if an affiliate signs up to your program via AFC, you know that affiliate is going to be a top-performer!.

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eBay to share more revenue starting next month, but on a condition

Techcrunch reports that ebay is all set to pay out twice as much in affiliate commissions to smaller affiliates and the number going even further upwards for larger affiliates, starting June 1.

However, with the increased payouts, eBay has also published new Ts and Cs stating that search marketers may no longer send PPC traffic directly to eBay. Affiliates will need to build landing pages to eBay via which they may route their paid search traffic.

The Terms and Conditions will include this new clause:

a. Search Engines. You will not be compensated for paid search traffic purchased from Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, nor from any of their content networks, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN ContentAds, if it is linked directly to the eBay.com, eBay Express, or eBay Store domains (not “Commission Earning Activity”). The change in policy is limited to the eBay.com US program, and to the three search engines stated above. Linking to a non eBay domain is allowed.

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Paypal is now officially a bank - in Europe.

Two months after eBay set up a new entity in Luxembourg, its PayPal subsidiary was granted a banking license for the European Union by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) in Luxembourg.

Reports AuctionBytes.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg have awarded PayPal a banking licence, and the ebay company will be moving their headquarters over to Luxembourg early next month.

This is big news, PayPal have maintained from the start that they are not a bank, but a mere payment facilitator, that doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.

Paypal has been operating in Europe for years without requiring to be recognized as a bank, neither were there any news recently that paypal would need to become a bank if they are to operate in europe.

PayPal said on Tuesday that the new banking license would allow it to continue its European expansion by offering its services to more online merchants across Europe.

It would be interesting to watch PayPal in the coming months. Who knows, they might even apply for bank status in the US and other parts of the e-commerce enabled world - Google checkout has suddenly become a major player out of nowhere in a market where paypal was a near monopoly, looks like this is one smart move to stay competitive, We should see some major slashes in paypal fees and some google checkout-like offers to attract merchants to use paypal soon!.

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Back to Akismet

Since about a little more than a week, I have been testing the Math comment plugin instead of Akismet to prevent comment spam on this blog. Akismet was blocking a lot of legitimate comments as spam, but it looks like the math comment plugin is not doing a great job at preventing spam from being posted as comments here.

So Bye bye math comment plugin, and welcome back Akismet. It’s just much easier to monitor the blog comments for a few non-spam comments and up-spam them than to spam-mark 50 comments each day.

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On Kings and Pawns

A couple of hours ago, I had a fierce argument with my dad (who is also the managing director of my company)
Our’s is a private limited company, which means, we can sell and/or distribute company stock privately, without being listed in a stock exchange, etc.

Dad suggest that we should distribute some of the stock to the company’s employees, to motivate them for working harder and better - Not as an incentive, just as a benefit for working here, a number of shares allotted as per the employee’s post. I was strongly against this.

I am of the opinion that making employees partners would be a terrible mistake and can result in a lot of bad things - it will make employees work less in terms of the quantity of work done and less efficiently in terms of work quality rather than more.

If a partnership is given without having to work for it first, it will be much less valued than if one actually earns that position by sticking with the company long enough and being a radically important factor in it’s growth, adding their visions to those of the founders and all that.

Being in the performance marketing industry since as long as I can remember, I am strongly for identifying employee performance and offering incentives based on that - and we already do that, the system here is to offer incentives to each employee after they have stayed six months at the job, based not only on their performance, but also the performance of the company overall - maybe this system needs some re-structuring and the incentives should be based on broader factors etc…

Anyway, as I was thinking about this; co-incidence, as it happens, happened.

Hugh Mcleod, explained all my thoughts in this cartoon that he posted on his blog.

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Online, Apparel is selling more than gadgets : NY Times

For the first time since online retailing was born a decade ago, the sales of clothing have overtaken those of computer hardware and software, suggesting that consumers have reached a new level of comfort buying merchandise on the Web.

Reports the New York Times.

And this is so true, about 5-6 years ago, when I first got into e-retail marketing, I would think people will never buy clothing and shoes and all online, shoppers need to see and touch a product, then try into on, before they actually buy it, but to my surprise, back then, consumers had already started adapting to the new way of buying.

This was and is being made possible, I am sure, because e-retailers who started out then, thought the same thing I did, and offered to convert consumers’ homes into dressing rooms by offering services such as free return shipping if you don’t like a product or if it doesn’t fit (also the reason why some of us affiliate marketers have so many reversals on referrals to some online retailers and our monthly earnings projections mostly always go wrong).

It’s not only the large venture-backed online retailers who can do this, even smaller retailers with nothing but their inventory, oscommerce and ebay etc stores and small advertising budgets can afford to offer such shopping ease to buyers, all one has to do is not care about margins, build customer loyalty that way and the volumes will happen before you know it.

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Adapt.TV : Yet Another Video Advertising Network Launching Today

This one is a bit different, unlike the competition that I wrote about here in the past, Adapt.tv serves ads for video, but the ads themselves are not video ads, they are simply static images or text with a link that are displayed pre and/or post-roll. Since there is no video being played in the advertisement, the network runs on the friendlier cost per click model rather than the newer to the internet advertising industry model of cost per view.

Metacafe will be the first video network to use Adap.TV ads

Their About page states “The company uses advanced technology that adapts in real time to consumers’ interests and their viewing behaviors”. How exactly this done, is not mentioned.

[via NewTeeVee]

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