Archives for June 2007

Kellie Stevens, President of AffiliateFairPlay.com, has reported that two separate class action lawsuits were filed on April 20, 2007 against Commission Junction, Be Free and ValueClick. One names CJ and Be Free publishers (affiliates) as the plaintiffs. The other names CJ and Be Free merchants as the plaintiffs.

The lawsuits concern the use of adware. According to Kellie…

The lawsuits allege breach of contract, negligence and unfair business practices on CJ/BF’s part by allowing adware affiliates to operate within their Network. The gist of it seems to be that CJ/BF has knowingly allowed adware affiliates within their Network which commit commission theft and fraudulent transactions through adware applications. The suit is seeking monetary damages to both affiliates and merchants. More importantly, in my opinion, they are seeking a change in ValueClick’s corporate policy related to adware and compliance.

More details at http://www.cjclassaction.com/.

DoubleClick Performics has been making improvements to their ConnnectCommerce platform as part of their affiliate marketing product development initiatives in 2007 that focus on improving the overall speed and scalability of their systems and improving publisher productivity.

A release on Saturday, June 9 included a significant boost to the database systems and operating hardware. This upgrade is intended to improve processing time for all ConnectCommerce users.

In addition, the recent release includes two feature enhancements for publishers:

• Advertiser Display Information: Improvement to the interface related to advertiser information, specifically adding a commissions column to each advertiser view. You can see the commission column when looking for new advertisers to join and when viewing all information for “approved,” “pending” and “declined” advertisers. In addition, commission information has been added to the “Agreement & Terms” section.
• Pending View: Publishers can now more easily access information related to pending orders with a “Pending Only” toggle. With this feature you can better understand the status and impact of outstanding orders. You can view the Pending Orders via a toggle within the following reports: “Activity,” “Advertisers,” “Links,” “Links Detail,” “Creative Size” and “Creative Type.”

I’m taking the day off from affiliate marketing news to celebrate the life of my dad, John Gary Collins, who passed away five years ago today.

I put together a brief video, Call Me Gary, with some pictures and footage.

You may have never known him, but to know me is to know him. So check out CallMeGary.com to see where my madness originates.

Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney), President of AuctionAds, shares some milestones the company has achieved at the 90 day mark, as well as a mash-up with Google Earth that shows the clicks for AuctionAds as they happen around the world.

AuctionAds enables both international and domestic affiliates to display dynamic ads via the eBay affiliate program without any programming skills. It’s just a matter of copy and paste.

Since launching on March 3, 2007, AuctionAds now has about 17,000 users, and they will be paying out nearly $500,000 to affiliates for the month of May.

There are currently about 400,000 clicks a day through AuctionAds and growing. More details at ShoeMoney.com.

Around this time last year, Affiliate Summit rescued the domain, JeffMolander.com, via an auction and gifted it to Jeff Molander. It’s been a while, so I figured I’d check in and see what Jeff is doing with it.

I was intrigued by the first headline, “Ben Edelman: Adware in Affiliate Marketing” with a description promising I could “Watch Harvard Law Assistant Professor, Ben Edelman discuss adware usage among major advertising brands”

But it looks like somebody named Lorem Ipsum must have hacked the page and replaced the video with some gibberish text.

An interesting item at the end of his bio…

Later in 2007, Molander is slated to release Ignorance Economy, an insider’s expose on digital advertising and media economics.

The footer has a link to a domain with the same name as the book title, but it’s a currently a placeholder page on GoDaddy.

I anticipate Jeff Molander’s book, and I’ll be looking out for his opinions and information on this site in progress.

I’m always on the lookout for new books on affiliate marketing, and I recently came across “Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond,” published April 13, 2007.

The book is geared towards affiliates, and I was anxious to read it, as there are few books about the industry, and a lack of resources to provide quality training for affiliates.

To be honest, I was disappointed in the book. While the book promises the reader they can “Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond,” the approach was elementary. Not the sort of level that’s going to bring somebody their affiliate millions.

The book kicks off with explanations of affiliate and search marketing and then follows with individual chapters dedicated to somewhat intuitive processes like joining an affiliate network, applying to an affiliate program, and setting up a ppc search campaign.

Each step in excruciating detail. It seems like they were trying to reach a word minimum, rather than write a helpful guide for affiliates.

If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, this book could be helpful in pointing you in the right direction. But if you’ve been working as an affiliate for a couple minutes, you’ll have a hard time reading beyond the first chapter.

Also, being that it’s a print book, some of the key information is already out of date.

The central theme of Affiliate Millions is that affiliate should buy traffic from the pay per click search engines and send that traffic straight to the advertiser’s site.

One of the affiliate programs prominently cited in the book is eBay. The problem with this example is that the strategy endorsed by the book (sending traffic straight from ppc search engines to advertisers) is something the eBay affiliate program no longer permits.

You will not be compensated for paid search traffic purchased from Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, nor from any of their content networks, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN ContentAds, if it is linked directly to the eBay.com, eBay Express, or eBay Store domains.

Also, I noticed a screenshot in Chapter 2 (Learning About Affiliate Advertising) where a search on MSN is shown with “iPod Nano” as the keyword being targeted. The Apple affiliate program forbids buying keywords with any of their trademarked names.

Affiliate Publisher may bid on search terms from website search engines or other directory or referral services (e.g. Yahoo Search Marketing, Google, etc. collectively Search Engines), provided that (i)Publisher Affiliate’s search terms, listing titles and descriptions, and the content of their websites do not violate the copyright or any other rights of Apple or third party, as determined by Apple at its sole discretion; and (ii)Publisher Affiliate complies with the following guidelines, as determined by Apple and its sole discretion: Affiliate Publisher Ads shall not be displayed in response to a keyword query containing Apple or any other Apple trademark, not any confusingly similar term, and Affiliate Publisher will not be paid for any transactions resulting from any keyword or phrase containing search keyword (including but not limited to Apple, Apple Store, Mac, MacBook, iPod and iPhone.

So if you get Affiliate Millions, take the advice with a grain of salt. It’s a decent introductory book for the newest of new newbies.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend the book for affiliate marketers with any degree of experience under their belts.

The auction on eBay to have Missy Ward, Shawn Collins, and all of the Affiliate Summit conference staff wear your company’s logo on their staff shirts during the entire Affiliate Summit 2007 East Show is almost over.

The auction on eBay ends on Monday, June 11 at noon EST.

The highest bidder will have their logo featured prominently on the front of the staff shirts. As I write this, the highest bid is $6,000.

Here is a photo from the last show when FlamingoWorld.com took the spot:

100% of proceeds earned from this auction will go directly to the March of Dimes.

If you are the lucky winner of having the Affiliate Summit team wear your company’s logo on the staff shirts, not only will you reap the benefits of your brand being prominently displayed throughout the entire conference (July 8-10, 2007 from 9:00am-6:00pm each day), your logo will also be featured on the Affiliate Summit site on the Affliate Marketers Care page.

And there will be lots of pictures and video from the conference, too.

Bid now – the auction ends on June 11, 2007 at noon EST.