Hot on the heels of last summer’s incredible Affiliate Summit East keynote by Ze Frank, I’m excited about this one. Jason is in/famous for his SEO views, and judging by his previous public addresses at SES, it is going to be interesting to see what he has to say to the affiliate marketing community.
September 28, 2007 at 10:45 am · Filed under Affiliates
Doc Searls speaks gospel:
As a verb market is not merely about selling. It is about convincing. Its ideal is control. This may not be what enlightened marketers want the verb to mean, but in practice that is what it has become: a tool of control by the industrial machine. That it often fails, and that good people want it to actually talk to customers, does not diminish its older and deeper intentions, which are rooted on the selling side of the axe that’s buried in all of our heads — no less deeply than the electric spikes on which the heads of the human batteries that power The Matrix are impaled.
It won’t be enough to revolt against the marketing machine. We need to build the Real World again, from the humans out to the companies that serve them. Real markets — the noun, not the verb — are what we need to strike a Neo’s bargain with the machinery of marketing. Unless we build tools for ourselves, we’ll just be talking the talk.
Particularly in the performance marketing space, we often fail at our goals because we’re looking to achieve some notion of control as implied by the use of the term “marketing” as a verb. Instead, skip back to the possibilities of doing “marketing” in the noun or pronoun sense.
That’s rich… especially for performance marketers who work so closely (much closer than the larger agencies in glass and concrete buildings analyzing plotted graphs) with the real and live choices that human beings make.
September 28, 2007 at 9:35 am · Filed under Affiliates
TinyURL is a handy service that converts long url’s into short url’s. Sounds simple and harmless, but there has been quite an on and off discussion about TinyURL over the past year in the marketing and tech space, ranging from TinyURL becoming the “next YouTube” (which I argued against) to whether or not services that use TinyURL, such as Twitter, should dump the service.
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks takes another stance and writes that Twitter should buy or build their own TinyURL service in order to preserve links in case the TinyURL service goes down (ironic since Twitter is down every other day at this point):
Sites such as Twitter use TinyURL to replace the links within tweets. I believe this is a mistake as many writers are moving to Twitter instead of blogging but the ability to view history is important. If TinyURL is down or out of service, not one Twitter URL will work. If Twitter was smart, they would take some of their VC money and buy the technology from TinyURL (or another short URL service) and make sure all URLs are using the twitter.com domain.
Twitter has also received heat in the past for using TinyURL based on SEO arguments. I disagree with Andy and others who make this point because Twitter is not intended to be a link sharing service and the idea of seeing the gaming that would take place if Twitter opened the nofollow doors is downright scary.
However, Twitter does need to consider the long term… what if TinyURL is bought by someone else in the near future who competes with Twitter or changes the link formula? Would all of those millions of links in Twitter’s archives suddenly become dead links? I’m starting to agree with Allen on this one, though I’m not sure his buy strategy will happen anytime soon.
Interesting debate to follow if you’re into thinking about the efficacy of links long term…
September 28, 2007 at 9:19 am · Filed under Affiliates
ReveNews has really taken off over the last couple of weeks and I’ve been doing a majority of my daily blogging over there as we try to breathe new life into that 10 year old institution. ReveNews has long been a community hub for online advertisers and marketers, big and small, so I feel that it was imperative to get the site up and flourishing again as quickly as possible after I assumed publisher duties.
I feel that goal has been accomplished to some extent, so I’ll be picking up my blogging here again. In my mind’s eye, I see this as my space for experimental cutting edge type marketing thoughts while ReveNews is more of an authoritative and polished site. It’s a healthy dichotomy and I think it’s sustainable in the long term. I’ve always viewed CostPerNews as the sandbox for ReveNews… the place to go to rough out the edges and get our hands dirty while trying to polish up our thoughts for the more mature stuff going on at ReveNews. That’s not always the case, but that’s what I aim for.
Anyway, thanks for hanging around and I hope to continue to make this a place of thought provocation and discussion on all things 2.0, twitter and next-gen.
September 18, 2007 at 1:33 pm · Filed under Affiliates
There is a good deal of blog buzz and industry chat about Google’s entry into mobile advertising. Read/WriteWeb has the best write up so far…
Google announced yesterday that it would bring its contextual text ads service, AdSense, to the mobile web. AdSense for Mobile will allow mobile web site publishers in 13 countries to monetize their content with text ads using the familiar pay-per-click model.
Analyst Frost & Sullivan predicts that the mobile advertising market will reach $2.12 billion in the US by 2011. Worldwide, the outlook is even rosier: $10 billion per year by 2010 says the Shoesteck Group, while EJL Wireless Research estimates a $9.5 billion yearly global mobile ad market by 2011.
The lack of companies in the performance marketing space in the mobile arena has created a market vacuum which Google will easily slide into and dominate (which they would probably be able to do even if other players were already there).
What is surprising is that the general reluctance/apathy towards mobile marketing and advertising seems so US-centric. Companies in Europe and Asia are quickly seizing the hearts and minds (and wallets) of mobile users while American companies from Yahoo or Microsoft to Valueclick and Doubleclick seem more than content to let the rest of the world rush ahead and pioneer the mobile market.
Have we lost our competitve edge here in the States along with our technological edge?
September 17, 2007 at 1:51 pm · Filed under Affiliates
If you’re not at TechCrunch40, the place to be is the IRC backchannel:
irc://irc.freenode.net/#tc40
I haven’t done IRC in years (especially since Twitter came about last year), but the place is hopping and hilarious with all sorts of bloglebrities and valleywaggers.
“Nokia said in a statement that the acquisition will allow it to accelerate the scaling of its mobile advertising business by leveraging Enpocket’s platform and strong partnerships with advertisers, publishers and operators.”
September 16, 2007 at 9:15 pm · Filed under Affiliates
Something does sit right with me about the new BlogRush service. Perhaps it’s the emphasis on traffic, traffic, traffic and a pyramid-scheme type set up.
Why can’t blogs just be about writing for passion’s sake and letting the money come if you’re talented enough?
This comes across as a service that tries to hard to appeal to the low hanging fruit of “bloggers” overly and aggressively attempting to “monetize” their blogs the quickest and easiest way possible.
