Affiliate marketers invited to advertise on MySpace

I somehow landed on MySpace’s MyAds website and noticed something I haven’t anywhere else – at least not at a place that aims to become (or is) a major player in online advertising — An open invitation to affiliate marketers to advertise on MySpace…

…and that’s a good thing, IMO. Now wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if only Adwords was also as welcoming to affiliates advertising on google.

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Joost on flash

Joost has finally become a truly web based video platform, no download required, videos can now be watched from the browser, which also makes joost linux-compatible at last!

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Youtube to become super-affiliate

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.

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CybaSumo: New social networking widget for indie artists and shops

Got a press release in the mail today about a new social shopping widget platform called CybaSumo. It’s a strange sounding name (somehow also the reason why I instantly wanted to check out the website), thankfully the release also had info on what it means.

The Name CybaSumo is ‘Formed by
combining the Latin words cyba for “merchant” and sumo for “to buy,” ‘

CybaSumo, essentially is a widget platform for shopping. What makes it unique is the fact that merchants and individuals can use it to sell both digital as well as physical goods for 2.5% per sale.

Tomorrow, they will officially turn this website into a social-shopping platform by letting people buy and sell – in a widget that can be embedded into social networks of your choice.

If you are looking to log-in to the website to buy stuff, don’t expect much, the site only has about ten sellers at the moment, however, it’s great to see such platforms come up every now and then. As I have mentioned in quite a few earlier posts and comments, I think it is ideas like these that take web 2.0 to the web 2.1. The “contribution economy”, where all user-generated content is monetizable – for the users, where a website (or widget, or social-network) is simply a platform for users to not only create content on, but also make money from it.

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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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Social Shop on Facebook with Amazon’s latest apps

It’s the social-shopping week, it seems. I already wrote about two new social shopping apps on facebook that launched this week. Now, it’s e-retail giant Amazon’s turn to get facebook users to social-shop.

“By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.”

In a news release earlier today, Amazon announced the launch of two new facebook applications – Giver and Grapevine. “Giver” lets users view their friends’ Amazon wishlists and share their own, “Grapewine” populates the user’s facebook feed with their activity on amazon.com (one gets choose what type of activity to share upon signing up).

“Use Amazon Giver to let your Facebook friends know and buy what you wish for, as well as gift suggestions, and Amazon Grapevine to show your friends what you’ve been up to on Amazon.com, such as writing Customer Reviews, adding items to your Wish List, and tagging products”

It would have been even more awesome if amazon had somehow added an affiliate marketing element to their facebook suite of apps. Say, if someone buys something on your wishlist by clicking on it – for someone else – you get the standard amazon associates revenue-share on the sale credited to your affiliate account. something like that would boost their apps’ usage and make social-shopping recommendations on facebook a lot more fun.

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Social Shopping is Huge in China. “In China, 58% of all purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content such as consumer reviews and rating sites, forums and discussion boards, blogs and other UGC. In the US, only 19% of purchase decisions were influenced by user-generated content.” (via emarketer)

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Radical Buy ~ Social Shopping + Affiliate marketing on facebook

Was browsing facebook and came across an interesting and simple little social shopping + affiliate marketing app that seems to be quite popular. Radicalbuy lets users buy and sell stuff on facebook, charges sellers a cut on sale.

The cool part about this is, that members who don’t have anything to sell can simply add stuff on their facebook profiles from other sellers and get a commission on every sale.

Utilizing the millions of members on Facebook, you can list an item and have it visible to all Facebook users instantly. After you list an item, others can post your listing on their Facebook page to earn commission! For example, if you sell a watch for $100.00, you may offer anyone 10% commission to sell it for you. If someone sells your watch for you, they get $10.00. The amount of commission you offer is entirely up to you.

They’ve also got widgets and stuff for embedding into blogs, but it’s the facebook potential of this thing that’s pretty huge. I’ll sign up and will probably write a review later this week. In the meantime, it’s a facebook application definitely worth a look whether you are an e-retailer or affiliate marketer or if you simply want to add cool products to your facebook profile, and make some cash in the process.

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Venturebeat article about the growth of visual shopping search service Like.com

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Google knows your friends, and your friends’ friends.

Google, today launched a new API, something that could be a revolutionary new tool for social apps and the social media in general — The Social Graph.

This latest API from google will allow developers of social apps grab what is normally the essential-most piece of a social-startup’s puzzle from the public web and that is the information of who knows whom. One way this can be used, according to google, is, for example if a new user signs up with your cool new social network — your network, thanks to the API, already knows whom that person knows and to how. So, all the friends of this new user who are already on your network, can automatically be in his/her buddy list there. Pretty cool huh?

I almost forgot to mention the most interesting part, All this, thanks to those ‘rel’ tags made oh so famous because of nofollow, in web links.

“Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site. “

Come to think of it, google has been, since the beginning, been using social graph data to make their SERPs look so good. however, the recent increased usage of XFN and FOAF data in these rel tags (XFN – the XHTML friends network and FOAF – Friend Of A Friend, are standards based linking meta-data mechanisms let you specify when you link to a URL, how are you related to the person who owns that URL) google has made it really easy for developers working on so many applications other than search to harness the usability of social linking.

More on: Google Code, Tech Crunch

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