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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Google Sitemaps for Video - Making your videos more searchable

It’s already on techmeme, but if you missed it, Google has launched a way for webmasters to let them know if you have video content on your website.

No longer waiting for google to figure out that you host your own video, or uploading your content to youtube etc just so that it appears on google’s video search result pages. It is now possible to simply tell google to crawl your video pages for indexing into video.google.com and possibly also universal search.

More on the google webmaster blog > 

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata

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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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“Rich Ads” on Google SERPs

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]

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Amazon adds NBC shows to Unbox

In a Press release Amazon posted a few moments ago (and only a few days after Apple decided to stop selling NBC shows on iTunes), they announce the availability of NBC shows for download at Amazon Unbox - the (unfortunately DRMed) Tivo-compatible video download service.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and NBC Universal today announced that a wealth of quality TV content from NBC Universal is now available on Amazon Unbox (http://unbox.amazon.com), Amazon.com’s digital video download service. Amazon Unbox and NBC Universal are offering customers a variety of content packages, including up to 30 percent off when purchasing full seasons of their favorite TV series.

Popular NBC shows now available on Amazon Unbox include the Emmy(R) Award-winning series The Office, the critically acclaimed drama Heroes, and Emmy(R)-nominated comedy 30 Rock. Beginning on September 10, Amazon Unbox customers can download for free — in advance of their network premieres — the pilot episodes of NBC’s new shows Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. New episodes will be available on Amazon Unbox the day after they air on TV.

NBC Universal Television Content Now Available on Amazon Unbox

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SEO 2.1: Speak clearly, rank higher on google’s SERPs

According to the Red herring blog, Google’s Marissa Mayer said at a silicon valley conference yesterday that the search giant is using google’s automated free 411 service - 1-800-GOOG-411 - to strengthen their software’s voice recognition capabilities and eventually use speech in videos to enhance video search results.

Eventually, google aims to further improve video search by adding visual search to the mix - in which google’s indexing software “searches through the images in the video for patterns, matching faces to another image, etc.”.

History repeating itself? Google was the first search engine to ignore author generated meta-tags in “Web 1.0″ pages and rely heavily on pagerank instead. In video, Google seems to not want to rely on user-generated tags to index video as soon as they have the capability for a more advanced method, which they are already developing.

More on the Red herring blog

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

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.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

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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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New Inline Video ads on YouTube

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

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