It’s gone too far, Lynda.
photobucket spam on Sam Harrelson’s Flickr
My pal Angel Djambazov of ReveNews has a great post on his frustrations with the MyBlogLog platform and its incessant spam problem.
I offer up a few thoughts about why and how this could be resolved in the comments there (basically, the model of MBL is flawed and that’s why Twitter is the winner).
Some from Angel:
MyBlogLog Needs to Wake Up Their Porn Problem | ReveNews: “MyBlogLog has all the elements of a really great tool. Blog owners, especially those whose content is more news orientated, will find the oversight that allows these spammers in as a poor reflection on their community.
Yahoo needs to realize that in certain cases a picture can equal a thousand words of spam. Until then actual readers can get their news and their g-string pictures at the same time.”
And some from me:
“That’s why I think Twitter and the platforms that have been made popular since MBL was sold to Yahoo back in ‘07 have done so well (especially for those of us in the marketing space)… it’s the publisher or user who gets to be the gatekeeper and fend off the spammers as they arise. The follow/no-follow/block paradigm is much better than the wild-west mentality of MBL.”
Good convo going on there… head over to ReveNews and add some of your thoughts.
Yahoo announces their Yahoo Deals platform:
Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Have I got a deal for you: “Retail isn’t all doom and gloom. While total spending may drop this season as consumers guard their net worth, Forrester Research predicts that online shopping will actually rise 12% over last year, mainly because half of online shoppers anticipate that the best values and deals will be found on the Web. And it goes without saying that they’ll also avoid the stress of crowded malls and long lines when they log on in their pajamas.”
Similar to Microsoft Cashback, the aim is to help consumers find the best deals for popular products.
Should be interesting to see how well they do with this…
YouTube has passed Yahoo to become the #2 search engine…
TG Daily - YouTube surpasses Yahoo as world’s #2 search engine: “ComScore’s most U.S. search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft’s MSN sites.”
What does this mean for affiliates?
Here are three initial thoughts:
1) Affiliate marketers need to be supplementing content with video (hosted on YouTube).
2) Affiliates need to be making sure that their video endeavors are viewer and keyword friendly. In other words, although it is great to load up your videos with highly sought after terms, you also need to make your video enjoyable, memorable and personable. Are you not that interesting? Hire someone or start reading blogs about marketers using video (like Jim Kukral’s).
3) Think outside the text paradigm and implement (YouTube hosted) video anywhere you can in your affiliate campaigns.
I know affiliate marketers who spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on Yahoo and MSN, which are now behind YouTube in terms of search volume. You might not have thousands of dollars to spend on search, but you do have the time and creativity to make good (and even viral) videos. Be creative and explore. You never know what will catch on.
