Coming soon — Video on shareasale

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

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Big News: Ebay Leaving CJ, to launch the ebay partner network

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”.

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Coupon affiliate retailmenot launches social network. TechCrunch has the details

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“Are you an affiliate marketer? You suck!” ~ Calacanis

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.

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

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Amazon adds more features to widgets

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!

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

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First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

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.

(more…)

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Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

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.

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Google puts product searches above ads this season

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.

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