Google Rebrands Performics into Google Affiliate Network
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, Google Affiliate Network, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Performics | Comments Off
Google has just announced that it is integrating the Performics affiliate network and rebranding it as the “Google Affiliate Network“.
Google describes it thus:
Google acquired the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate operations in March 2008. Together, we’re creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion, and innovation in affiliate marketing.
Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.
Google has been attempting to enter the affiliate marketing industry since early 2007. At the time Google launched its Referral Program within the Adsense network. This program offered lackluster results, and Google announced it will be closing the Adsense Referrals program soon.
Publishers have the option to replace the referral ad placements with traditional Adsense ads. Google is encouraging them to sign up for the new Google Affiliate Network.
It will be interesting to see how the Google search and Adwords platforms respond to the new Google Affiliate Network link technology. It is common knowledge in the affiliate marketing industry that Google penalizes naked affiliate links.
Uncloaked affiliate links will prevent affiliate pages from ranking well in the SERP’s. Google has been penalizing affiliate links, because it has stated that “thin affiliates” offer little value other than a “doorway page” to another site.
It is ironic that Google is now pushing a network of publishers who will be doing just that.
Google Adwords has also penalized affiliate landing pages with uncloaked affiliate links with its infamous “Quality Score” known to affiliate marketers as the Google Slap. This results in immediate bid requirements of $5 to $10 per click. The end result makes Adwords advertising impossible without using link cloaking and other methods.
 I will be watching and probably experimenting with whether Google will be applying their search and Adwords penalty to publishers using their own affiliate network. I ask all my readers the following important question.
Will Google’s enthusiasm for their new Affiliate Network skew their standard penalty against affiliates?
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this question.
Microsoft Offers $45 Billion for Yahoo!
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, MSN, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
In a surprise unsolicited bid this morning, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion for the purchase of Yahoo! Inc. This comes out to just over $31 a share, and it seems that Microsoft is attempting to take advantage of the soft stock market. As the news hit, Yahoo! stocks were immediately up almost 50%, but what does this all mean to the affiliate marketer?
Let’s take a closer look at the deal being offered first. Microsoft’s press release states:
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.
   “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry
partners.”   “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been
progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our
own.”
Let’s discuss how this all affects affiliate marketers. If this deal goes through it could decrease the competition within the search market, which is generally a bad thing in my mind. This means that the impact of one company’s change in policy could more severely damage affiliate marketers, as Google did with Google Slap #1 and Google Slap #2. No one knows if there will continue to be further slaps from Google.
That said, I would much rather see Microsoft purchasing Yahoo! Inc. than Google. At least there would still be 2 very large players in the search market. Microsoft would be able create a balance to the power of Google. Yahoo’s Publisher Network would enhance Microsoft’s attempts to expand it’s content network and technology.
One question that comes up on the practical side of things is whether Microsoft would attempt to consolidate it’s own search under the Yahoo brand or vice versa. Since Yahoo has a much larger market share than Microsoft, I imagine that would be the case. This makes less work for affiliate marketers who spend a good deal of time modifying campaigns for three separate search engines at present. The downside to this is increased competition within the PPC sphere driving costs up.
It still remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Inc. will take the unsolicited offer made by Microsoft, but they sure did try to make the deal pretty sweet! – a 62% premium on the current stock price will be a hard offer to decline. We will just have to wait and see.
Testing AuctionAds Advertising Platform
Filed Under Adsense, AuctionAds, Google, Yahoo, Yahoo Publisher Network | Comments Off
If you take a look at the sidebar on my blog you will see an advertisement served up by the AuctionAds advertising platform. AuctionAds launched about 3 months ago. It is the brainchild of ShoeMoney as a way for affiliates to earn top tier commissions from eBay by pooling everyone’s efforts together.
Ebay pays high volume publishers a much better percentage of sales than they pay to lower level publishers. Shoemoney estimates they are generating about 400,000 clicks per day through their new AuctionAds platform. That is an incredible amount of volume.
If you sign up as an eBay affiliate on your own here is the commission structure you will be faced with:
Revenue Share Compensation
eBay Revenue Compensation
$0 – $99.99 50%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 55%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 60%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 65%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 70%
$3,000,000.00 + 75%Active Registered User (ACRU)
ACRUs Compensation
1 – 49 $25.00
50 – 1,999 $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 $31.00
30,000 + $35.00
This in itself makes it clear why Auction Ads is such a good idea. By pooling many affiliates traffic together AA (AuctionAds) are able to maintain the top tier commission payout of 75%. That is 25% better than what someone starting out on their own would earn. This is one of the reasons why AA has over 17,000 users at just 90 days running.
Ad Widgets
To make things simple for publishers who are used to running Adsense ads, AA has provided ad blocks that are formatted in all the same sizes as adsense advertisements. There is no need to reformat your Adsense site to incorporate AA or a combination of AA and Adsense.
Referral Program
To make the deal even sweeter for publishers, AA has integrated a referral program into their ad units. Most everyone knows that Google’s Adsense has benefitted from free advertising on all of its publisher sites by incorporating a link to a sign up page on each and every Adsense unit. That notorious “Ads by Gooooooogle” is really just a link to get other publishers to sign up. Google has never offered it’s publishers any compensation for this referral program. Yahoo Publisher Network does the exact same thing.
Auction Ads explains how their referral program is different:
With AuctionAds, we don’t want you to worry about the loss of revenue caused by the branding we use to identify the ad units as ads on your site. So we have implemented a referral program that is imbedded right into your ad units. So anytime anyone clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds†and signs up for the program, you will earn 2% of those new publisher’s earnings. Pretty sweet deal. This means every single click made from our ad units, even the clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds†gives you the potential to earn money.
I will be testing AuctionAds on this blog over the next few weeks to see what my readers think. I am not sure if the products offered will be useful to you all. As in everything, you will all vote with your wallets, and in time I will report to you if AuctionAds are really a money maker or not.
The ShoeMoney vs. SEOmoz Link Discosure Debate
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, Link Discosure, Pay Per Post, Yahoo Publisher Network | Comments Off
Everyone seems to be talking about the link disclosure debate between ShoeMoney’s Jeremy Schoemaker and SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin. They are debating whether disclosure is necessary when a paid review is posting on a blog, or when an affiliate link is used for a recommended product. I think this gets down to two distinct issues.
- Whether or not paid reviews posted on blogs should be disclosed as paid reviews. These are the reviews where a company pays the blogger directly or through an intermediary like Sponsored Reviews, PayPerPost and ReviewMe
- Whether or not an affiliate link should be disclosed if a product is being recommended.
Paid Blog Reviews
I want to discuss the paid blog reviews first. Currently both ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews require paid reviews to be disclosed as such. PayPerPost does not require disclosure. I feel disclosure is up to the blogger and Rand Fishkin agrees with me on this:
OK, let me first say that I agree with Jeremy’s opinion about blogger disclosure policies or some sort of blog organization that lords over bloggers with codes of conduct. I’m not a fan of it in the SEO world, and I’m not a fan of it in the blogosphere either. It’s up to individual bloggers to decide and individual audiences to trust or reject what they read.
The essence of this issue is trust. Can readers trust a blogger’s message if they are getting paid to write? I think that depends on the blogger. A blogger with integrity will write their true opinion of a product or service whether they are paid or not. If a blogger writes a positive review of a product they would not themselves use, then they are being dishonest to their readers. As Fishkin says, the readers will have to decide for themselves whether they can trust the blogger’s opinion.
Jeremy Schoemaker writes the following opinion:
In fact every time I see a blog post or basically anything including conversation I assume someone is benefiting from mentioning the product they are talking about. Even if they are not paid directly for reviewing or mentioning the product directly I assume they are hoping the users find the information useful or maybe even the product owner will see the review and pay them in the form of mentioning them back or advertising on there site…
…So basically my disclosure policy is you should assume I am getting paid for or will get paid for anything I ever mention…
…I think these blogger disclosure policies while noble and all that good stuff are extremely silly. Everyone gets paid one way or another.
Schoemaker makes the point that you should assume he is making money from everything he mentions, so there is no need for disclosure. While I don’t agree with the premise of his position that everything is paid for everything they write, I do agree that no one should be required to do anything. I am not currently paid for what I write on this blog. I offer my honest opinion on subjects I have knowledge of. But I do believe in the blogger’s freedom to choose whether they want to disclose or not. It is no one’s business but the blogger’s, and they are the one who has to decide.
Why would anyone disclose at all if it is the blogger’s prerogative? Bloggers will disclose when they feel it is necessary because they want to build the trust of their readers. If readers do not trust a particular blogger’s opinion they will move on to another blog they can trust. Popularity in blogging is all about the trustworthiness of the information that is presented. Bloggers who use the pay per post services have to do a balancing act of choosing companies and products that their readers will be interested in and those they can honestly recommend. I think readers will smell a dishonest blogger a mile away. Once they do, they will never come back.
Affiliate Link Disclosure
The second issue being discussed is whether or not affiliate links should be disclosed as affiliate links when a product is recommended on a blog or a website. While there are some instances when the disclosure of a link as an affiliate link can be advantageous, as a rule I don’t think it is necessary.
The same rules that govern the trustworthiness of a blogger also govern disclosure of affiliate links. If the blogger is simply promoting anything and everything they can make money from through an affiliate program and omitting everything that doesn’t have an affiliate program, then the reader should use his brain and read someone else’s review or recommendation. The onus is on the consumer of information to consider the source. If the source is considered trustworthy, then the advice is assumed solid. If not, then find another source.
The debate about link disclosure has long been fermenting and is just now coming to a head. As more and more pay per post programs crop up, the affiliate marketing and internet marketing community have to come to grips with what they consider ethical.
I trust the market in these circumstances, and I believe the paid reviews market has spoken on the issue of disclosure. Two of the three pay per post programs mentioned above require some form of disclosure of a paid review. None of the affiliate networks I know of require the disclosure of a link as an affiliate link. Most advertising platforms like Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network have integrated disclosure into their ad units. The market deems disclosure necessary is most cases, except for affiliate links.
Rigorous debate is a sign of a healthy community, but I would oppose any legal requirements because they would infringe on the freedom and rights of the individual blogger. I think this is something that both Fishkin and Schoemaker would agree on.