Will cut larger checks, save paper.

Effective August 28, Affiliate network CJ will pay affiliates only once they have accumulated a minimum of $100 in commissions - in an effort towards eco-friendliness -  from the current minimum of $25, the new minimum direct deposit amount, however remains at $50. 

Smaller affiliates, especially in parts of the world where CJ doesn’t not provide a Direct deposit facility will have to wait longer to see their commission money.

The changes are as follows:

It’s good to see that CJ is showing concern towards the environment, but they should really think about providing direct deposit or paypal to countries besides the US, UK, canada and a few others. Affiliates in these parts of the world will still have to order checks.

Found this newteevee blog post under more items on techmeme. You tube, according to CEO Chad Hurley, is all set to use the affiliate marketing route as an additional monetization opportunity besides display ads.

Hurley said at an event in Palo alto that they are already integrating affiliate links to Amazon and iTunes within Music video and TV show videos

“We’re integrating links to iTunes and Amazon for DVDs, CDs, and digital downloads,” Hurley said. “A lot of our content does drive awareness for music or for TV shows or movies, and a lot of our partners are really just excited to make that connection between the two — going from promotional, getting people to tune into a TV show or buy a movie ticket — to that direct response in terms of clicking to buy something.”

More on NewTeeVee >

Users of Last.fm may have noticed that the web 2.0 radio is already doing something similar when you log in to the website to listen to music or watch videos, they’ve got affiliate links to amazon where users can buy the music.

Commission Junction’s BFAST affiliate platform is all set to close on the 15th this month according to a notice on CJ’s website.

BFAST, once part of Befree, a pioneering affiliate network, was sold to ValueClick in 2002 which later also purchased Commission Junction in 2003 and decided to integrate both the platforms under the CJ brand. One wonders what took VLCK so long to finally shut down the BFAST platform.

Google is now offering landing page load time evaluations for adwords. Nice. Post on the inside adwords blog says load times will be part of quality score starting mid june. hmm, I was under the impression load times were already being calculated.

Froogle - Google Product Search, which launched as Froogle many years ago as a price comparison shopping engine later changed it’s format to a simple product search engine that would display the stores that sell a product you are searching for, without grouping the stores that sell the searched product according to prices, but simply in random algorithmic order - each product listing displaying a merchant-specific description and other details.

This was probably because froogle would, at the time, crawl e-stores for price and product information and the index was anything but accurate. Since introducing google base, the product search engine has stopped crawling the web for product info, it instead relies on data-feeds submitted by merchants - in a manner much similar to Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other price comparison sites. Despite the added accuracy, few people actually use google’s product search feature independently of the top-three product listings that appear within universal search.

Now, again, google seems to be experimenting with the price comparison engine format, complete with one description, and product specs per product - which is great news shoppers - there is now a real price comparison engine that includes more buying options than any other out there. As for merchants, most of whom already have their datafeeds uploaded to google base, This would be one of the few price comparison sites that is completely free - merchants don’t pay for clicks or sales, and if your store offers competitive prices, all the better, expect additional traffic!

Not all searches are showing up as price comparison results, but more SERPs are changing their skin real quick. Probably not very long before the transition is completed.

Yahoo testing “Ads by google” with US search queries http://tinyurl.com/5q4hyb

Adsense ad units become interactive, will improve CTR http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/04/show-me-ads.html

Google trying to quiet all criticism of being the owner of a search marketing company, will sell the search business of performics, and more importantly integrate it’s affiliate marketing business into existing google products (adsense?).

There’s a Change in google adwords policy “Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception.”

This is very exciting news. Everyone’s favorite affiliate network, ShareASale is hard at work on developing what they call a “v-commerce” solution - a video player/widget built for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing.

Carolyn Tang of SAS announced this to members of the shareasale group in facebook and is currently inviting ideas and suggestions in an ongoing facebook discussion here.

“we’re gettin’ with the times and exploring v-commerce. Nothing like bringing the magic of television online! Our tech team is hard at work developing a player with embedded tracking for affiliates to use on their sites.” ~ Carolyn Tang

Wow, this is huge. Online super-auctioneer, e-Bay always had an affiliate program, and it was always through a “trusted third party” At first, they were on a microsoft-owned affiliate network (remember clicktrade?) and later migrated to CJ sometime in the early 2000s.

Anyway, Today is an important day in affiliate marketing history. CJ has lost one of it’s biggest affiliate programs. e-Bay is going in-house. They announced this in an email to affiliates today that all the worlds ebays (including ebay US - Not including some of ebay’s non-auction properties such as stubhub, prostores, etc.) will need to be promoted via ebay’s own system beginning the first of April 2008.

“The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform. “

More details at the announcement page on ebay

Update: See also: AffiliateTip.com - Apparently, this was probably in the works since september 2006. See link on the affiliatetip post to “project rover”.

Coupon affiliate retailmenot launches social network. TechCrunch has the details

Jason calacanis keynoted at the Affiliate Summit’08 today. I was very curious what the SEO hater would talk about at the summit ever since it was announced that he will be keynoting the event. Sam Harrelson live-blogged the speech at revenews, which I just finished reading (I’m not at the summit, just sitting here in Bombay wondering what happened - thanks, Sam for the liveblogging!).

Not surprisingly, Jason’s general sentiment during the speech seems to be filled with hate towards the industry with statements like “Give up a life of crime”, “You are at the bottom of the food chain” and “Affiliate marketing is bullshit”, there couldn’t have been a worse affiliate summit keynote speech.

“Someone in this room could create the next digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, etc. None of you probably will create these companies because you’re wired for the quick buck.” ~ Jason Calacanis

Clearly, Jason, who thinks all affiliates are spammers and haven’t added value whatsoever to the web doesn’t really understand what affiliate marketing is. Let me define it for you here jason. Affiliate marketing is the simple act of connecting a buyer with a seller, and it has added tremendous value to the web, and created bigger brands that you will ever dream of creating. Which brands? okay .. lets see .. Affiliate number 1. Ebay - connects buyers with sellers, takes a cut. 2. Google, Same thing, only more CPC. Shopping.com and shopzilla, etc - same thing. Smaller affiliates are also doing the exact thing in smaller, unique and niche specific ways. Jason, I had really hoped you’d have done your homework this time, everyone is tired of your same old hate-speeches.

It is true, some people in the affiliate industry need to do cleaner businesses, but Calacanis - by classifying every affiliate at the bottom of the food chain and etc, has been a total waste of an affiliate summit keynote.

Nokia’s all new mobile advertising platform http://tinyurl.com/33ovty

Since launching affiliate widgets in september last year, Amazon announced today that affliates have created over 200,000 of these nifty web 2.0 marketing small-wonders already.

“Many of you came back with great suggestions and we’ve picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release.”

Amazon also announced today the addition of various new features that are being added to associate widgets starting today. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, associates can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. one can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

Power to affiliate widgetry!

BIG NEWS: AOL gets into affiliate marketing, buys buy.at. [Via Cost Per News]

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

You may already be using or must have at-least have looked at an Adpod somewhere else on the web. That’s because an AdPod is what Tumri, a widget advertising network that’s been around for a while calls their widgets - The Gap AdPod is powered by Tumri.

What I am not sure about, however, is that if Gap is the only merchant that is providing a widget ad on CJ or if it’s only the first one. Has CJ tied up with Tumri like Linkshare did last month and will gradually roll out the widget to other merchants?

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

Just noticed this while searching for some products on google.

The universal search now shows results from google products (what used to be froogle) just above adwords ads.

Somehow, this way of displaying product search results makes them a lot more viewable than earlier when they were shown just above standard organic search results, This new format does take a lot of eyeballs away from paid advertisements. this is bad news for PPC affiliates and advertisers who use adwords to promote their products but haven’t uploaded their datafeeds to google base yet.

Blogged with Flock

Great news from linkshare today - they announced the merchandiser query tool that allows affiliates to use their REST based API to “just enter your search term and get the link you want”

From the announcement email:

As we continue our year of innovation, LinkShare is pleased to announce the release of a new Merchandiser Query tool that allows you to search for products within your Merchandiser data feeds. This API makes your life easier! No more digging for product links, just enter your search term and get the link you want.

Using a REST-based web service, the Merchandiser Query tool allows you to do a full text search for products that match keywords in any of the following categories:
* Product Name
* Primary Product Category
* Short Product Description
* Long Product Description
* Keywords

Finally, a GIANT leap forward by linkshare in the “programmable affiliate-web” department.

A PDF user guide for the API can be downloaded here…

Suddenly, a lot of major players have started announcing widget advertising initiatives. This time, it’s google announcing the launch of their widget gadget ads, which will now be available to select adwords advertisers.

Google Gadget Ads have been spotted before, but now Google made them official with a press release – albeit they’re still only available to some select AdWords advertisers. Gadget Ads, as opposed to normal text link or image ads, contain interactive content such as Flash or HTML connected to a potentially updating data source… as they’re part of the iGoogle gadgets API. Google presents a gadget ad example (a small Flash game, basically) saying that of the 94.5 million impressions the ad got, it was interacted with 0.3% of the time.

Google Gadget Ads - Google Blogoscoped

——————–

BTW, In other (bigger) google news that I just read (I’m catching up with the RSS feeds after almost a week of social media inactivity), Adsense for Mobile was also announced yesterday!

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

It so happens with google, that if I write something about them, the very next post here also has to be about google and nothing else.

Anyway, Google has, since the beginning, opposed the use of image ads (or banners as they were called back then) in it’s search results, this is probably about to change soon, and it doesn’t seem as unlike google as it would have, say, a year ago, now that SERPs are universal search results.

The ads could include image or video ads in a variety of ways, offering more options to advertisers. Google insists that whatever image and video ads are shown, they will match the type of content you’re searching. So you’re more likely to see an image ad if you’re conducting an image search. The same goes for video. Remaining relevant with these types of targeted ads is a self-proclaimed objective for Google.

Google might soon include image and video ads on SERPs arrording to this post on google sytem.

[via mashable]

According to the latest blog post and adsense, some publishers are afraid that someone will steal their adsense code and put it on inappropriate sites - which could get the publisher banned from adsense.

In order to prevent this, Google has introduced a new “Allowed sites” feature to the adsense interface where publishers can list the websites they actually are using adsense codes on, so even if your code is on an ‘inappropriate’ site (in which I hope MFA sites are counted) - that’s okay, the publisher won’t get banned or paid for that.

There is, ofcourse a google twist to all this. Free Advertising (on websites that woudl otherwise get publishers banned from adsense):

Sites that aren’t on your list can still display ads using your ad code; however, impressions and clicks for these sites won’t appear in your reports, advertisers won’t be charged, and you won’t receive any earnings from them.

Allowed and Clear - Google Adsense blog

It is probably obvious from some of my posts here that I like paypal, and so does Yahoo!, I guess. Yahoo’s publisher network is now offering the option of receiving payments via paypal. Cool!

More on: Affiliate Fortune Cookies, Affiliate Tip

CJ Announced yesterday via email, the availability of two brand new APIs and upgrades to existing ones.

Developers can now access CJ’s (almost) real time transaction reports and daily sales reports via the new APIs.

From the email:

Along with this release, Commission Junction has updated the widely used product catalog and link search APIs. The Product Catalog API now offers new request parameters and response fields that match the Product Catalog datafeed. The Link Search API now delivers the ability to query promotional links similar to those found in the CJ Account Manager. With these updates, you can expand your applications to further enhance your customer experience, increase conversion rates and drive higher transaction volume.

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

———————

Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

The official google blog has detailed why exactly they are buying the internet advertising company Doubleclick.

We believe DoubleClick can help Google deliver better, more relevant display ads, which improves the online experience of consumers. From a technical perspective, Google will also be able to get web pages to load faster by reducing latency from ad servers. Publishers will benefit by making more money from remnant inventory and – as has been the case with other technologies we’ve acquired – we hope to make ad serving more accessible. Smaller publishers would get access to DoubleClick’s ad serving technology, enabling them to better compete in the global marketplace.

Q: Why is every product made by Apple stylish and sexy?
A: Because they have rounded corners!

Google wants to make adsense ad units look sexy, and whether or not they give credit to apple for inspiring this new design of their ads, I’m sure google wants adsense to eventually be as cool as apple - which is why, they have come up with this -

To get started with these new ad shapes, visit the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab in your account. As with all format options like sizes and colors, different corner styles will perform better for different publishers. We recommend that you choose the corner style that best matches the look and feel of your sites. Please keep in mind that if your page background color, ad background color, and ad border color are all the same, these new corners won’t be visible.

We go round and round — (Inside Adsense blog)

Well, not quite - I don’t advertise on Adwords CPC and one of the requirements to be eligible for beta-testing the PPA ads is that an advertiser must have generated atleast 500 conversions from their click campaigns in the past 30 days.

Nevertheless, Google has taken the PPA advertising platform global and is now allowing advertisers and publishers from around the world to participate in the CPA ad platform - which was limited to only US advertisers and publishers since first beta was announced three months ago. This would make google the primary and largest performance-based lead generation platform in many parts of the world.

This, once again, brings many affiliate marketers back to the question that was raised when the beta was first announced. “Will Google eat CJ and Linkshare alive?” Most affiliate marketers who have been in the industry long enough don’t think so. Google is on to something, but it isn’t quite affiliate marketing. they are an advertising company and adwords (CPC and CPA) is an advertising network - these are two different ballgames.

Sure, google could add to existing affiliate-marketing revenues, but the possibility of Adwords eating up a share of the existing affiliate-network pie is highly unlikely. The one way that google can really affect the affiliate networks of today, is if they do something about the newly acquired doubleclick and performics, like bringing the performics platform to all adsense publishers and adwords advertisers, making opening an affiliate program on performics as cost-effective as advertising on adwords. Such a thing, as of now, can’t be seen for quite some time in the future. Google seems to see Doubleclick as mostly a CPM based banner advertising platform. CJ and Linkshare are safe.

More on:

5 Star Blog, Cost Per News, Search Engine Journal, Inside adwords, Clickz

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

A Little less than a week ago, we saw the Apple Store US and Canada Affiliate Program open on CJ.  Today, Apple announced this to all it’s linkshare affiliates:

We regret to inform you that Apple has made a business decision to shut down the Apple Store US and Apple Store Canada LinkShare Affiliate Programs. Please note that iTunes and .mac affiliate programs are not affected and are continuing to run their programs through the LinkShare Network.

Get ready to find and replace those linkshare links to the new CJ links! The current links will remain active up to the 30th of June.

I was browsing techcrunch the other day, and noticed the ad of a sponsor there, Adicate - an online advertising network with a twist.

Adicate has taken the television advertising approach to the world of online advertising - they allow publishers to sell ad-spots on their websites - by the hour.

Adicate claims to already deliver as many as 35 million impressions each day using this model.

Their pitch is also pretty convincing. An email from them that I recieved upon requesting more information states:

One of the advantages with Adicate TimeAds is that advertisers can show their ads at their own prime time. This means that a medicine company can advertise for stimulants daytime, diet pills around dinnertime and sleeping aid at night time. This also gives the advertiser the unique opportunity to stand by waiting in the advertising period and interact with the customer immediately.

Now I don’t sell medicine, but this logic can potentially be applied to many other areas. For instance, advertising a job-site just before the end of the work day, etc.

I haven’t signed up with them as an advertiser (or publisher) yet, so it is still to be seen what kind of statistics and targeting they provide to advertisers - which can be a very crucial thing with such a system.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting new concept and worth giving a try, although I am not too certain if adicate will be able to introduce and create the CPH (Cost Per Hour) advertising metric as a standard in online media.

This is one area where CJ can claim to have done it first.

Finally, Linkshare has announced today, a webservices offering (API?) for affiliates that they are calling the “Automated LinkGenerator”

From Their Email Announcement:

Automated LinkGenerator creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant’s site that offers LinkGenerator. This new feature provides the same functionality as the LinkGenerator tool in the Individual Product Links interface, without having to log into the Affiliate Interface to get your links. This new tool does not replace Merchandiser (LinkShare’s datafeed), but will be helpful for getting direct links from merchants that do not offer Merchandiser feeds.

If you are interested in using the Automated LinkGenerator, please email us at linkgen_request@linkshare.com to have this new tool enabled. Once you are enabled, the Automated LinkGenerator will be located under the LinkShare Feed Synergy Services area of the Affiliate Interface. To create an Automated LinkGenerator link, you will use a REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services to request links for a given merchant URL. You will then send a URL from the merchant’s site to LinkShare using the specified link format (see the Automated LinkGenerator Help area).  The URL can be sent through a browser, a tool like wget or curl, or an automated script.  For each URL provided, LinkShare returns a click link.  You can request up to 1,000 links within an hour.

Read/write Web has a recent post that notes that google is soon (exact date unknown) going to integrate ads into Google Maps.

The good news for web publishers and developers is that Google would be sharing revenue from these ads to those sites and web-apps that have used Mapplets to create their google maps mashup.

On the lines of the Retail knowledge center, google has just announced the launch of the “Tech B2B Knowledge Center” - a minisite with case studies, tips and tricks, ideas etc for B2B businesses that use Adwords as a medium of online advertising.

Google Tech B2B Knowledge Center 

Brian littleton just twittered that shareasale’s much anticipated widget ad platform has just been activated.

Update: Announcement on shareasale’s blog.

As an affiliate, you can now preview and retrieve widget code for live use. Have fun!!!

Click the yellow link under the “Get Links” menu titled “Get Widgets”….

—-
P.S: this is my first blog post from a mobile phone ever!

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

Was just browsing Sam Harrelson’s 10 day old blog - Affiliate fortune cookies - and the feed burner sticker on it proclaims “100 subscribers”. This is phenomenal growth for a blog so young. Congrats Sam!

Sam has been posting some very useful tips, tricks and hacks for affiliates. As you would expect, the blog has a web 2.0 tilt in it’s content. There are posts that talk about matters ranging from how to monetize video and using facebook as a marketing platform to organizing your office and managing your time.

If you haven’t subscribed to the blog yet, you should - now. It’s an awesome resource for seasoned affiliate marketers to be introduced to entirely new concepts as well as for newbies to learn the art of affiliate marketing.

Google has just announced in the inside adwords blog new formats for the click-to-play video ads that have been around for a while.

Video ads can now be 28×90 Leaderboard, the 120×600 Skyscraper, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper joining the original formats of 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 200×200 Small Square, and the 250×250 Square.

We all see video on the web in square or at the most rectangle boxes, I wonder how it would be to view video playing in a skyscraper and a leaderboard area!

Get ready to scroll those eyeballs!

Inside AdWords: Click-to-play video ads available in three new formats

Chitika - A favourite CPC product ad platform of many bloggers has just introduced “linx”, a new system similar to Amazon’s Context Links that will automatically identify key products/keywords mentioned in the content on a website or blog and link those keywords to product comparison listings from the chitika network (which, if I remember correctly, runs on top of the shopping.com API)

As can be seen in the image, chitika’s javascript code will automatically recognize product names and keywords from a blog’s content and double-underline them, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over any of these links, they see the chitika widget pop up with links - monetized for the blogger - to products on various online stores via chitika’s network.

This new system is currently in closed beta and available only to select chitika publishers by invitation.

The Internet’s first big affiliate network - Linkshare, is also one of the first affiliate networks to be able to adapt itself to the new internet.

Linkshare is currently beta testing an ad network that they will be opening up to bloggers and product review sites called Linkshare Showcase. This network will focus on specific products from leading merchants and allow publishers to highly customize the ads with features and reviews. Publishers will be able to choose which products they want to recommend to their users from participating merchants

Reports Salvo.ws

Linkshare showcase is what will probably be a linkshare sub-network targeted towards bloggers and other web2.0 ish content heavy websites that will offer:

• One simple interface for choosing the products you want.
• One small piece of Javascript to copy and paste onto your site.
• LinkShare Showcase is optimized for peak performance.
• No waiting for your money. Fast payments, from the first $1.

There are, of course, other companies that offer such advertising networks, linkshare, however, is the first major affiliate network to talk about offering widget-merchandizing besides shareasale, which started offering widget ads earlier this month

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

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!.

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:<