:: Media Viper ::

Google Affiliate Network

I just received an E-mail from DoubleClick Performics that they are now Google Affiliate Network.

This should really be interesting as many affiliate marketers will want to join Google now as another way to further earn revenues.

Here is the E-mail

We are pleased to introduce Google Affiliate Network . Effective Monday, June 30, 2008, DoubleClick Performics Affiliate will operate as Google Affiliate Network. The integration with Google’s brand is a reflection of efforts to quickly assimilate our business and teams, as well as reinforce Google’s commitment to the Affiliate channel. Together with our new colleagues at Google we are creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion and innovation in Affiliate Marketing.

Within the next couple of weeks you will see some exciting changes to the user interface reflecting the new brand. The platform will continue to be hosted at www.ConnectCommerce.com, but will eventually migrate to a google.com product url.

As noted in earlier communications, DoubleClick Performics’ Search operations are being spun off and sold to a third party. While many advertisers have relationships with both DoubleClick Performics’ Affiliate and Search, there have always been separate account teams and product-specific specialists servicing clients’ search and affiliate programs. These teams remain intact. While the formal separation will occur when the Search business is sold, the businesses are functionally separate today.

We are proud of what we achieved as Performics and this name change signals a new milestone. Google provides world-class resources and enables us to continue to attract the best talent to support our advertisers and publishers. Now as part of Google we have an exciting and unprecedented opportunity to advance our industry. We remain committed to ensuring you receive the quality service you have come to expect from us.

We appreciate your business and look forward to doing great

To say the least this definitely gives food for thought as to what can be accomplished once all the pieces are in place!

I would really like to see comments on this and what others think of the new Network!

Microsoft Drops Hostile Takeover Bid!
Steve Ballmer & Microsoft have packed up their bags and gone and let the building or bidding!Microsofts boss yesterday decided to abandon his $42 billion takeover of Yahoo! After initially raising their offer by $5 billion Friday to $33 a share - and having it rejected again by the Internet icon’s CEO, Jerry Yang. Jerry denied the initial bid of $29.00 as well.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer,” Ballmer said in a letter to the Yahoo! CEO.

“After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal.”

Negotiations over the price of a possible deal began Friday between the two companies, sources said. Ballmer indicated that he was willing to pay $33 a share but Yang insisted his company was worth $37 a share, or nearly $5 billion more.

Sources have stated that Ballmer had contemplated dropping the bid since early last month after being rejected twice by Jerry Yang & Yahoo’s board of directors.

Most investment analysts and shareholders believed that there was little chance that Microsoft would walk away from the offer and Yahoo! shares traded up nearly 10 percent Friday to $29.70 in anticipation of a deal over the weekend.

The move may be terrible for Yahoo which stands to lose more than $15 billion in market value when the stock markets open tomorrow. Some large investors including hedge funds, were discussing throwing out the Yahoo! board themselves and trying to sell the company to Microsoft.

Many see this as a daring move if Microsoft is really gone for good. “There is no way that Yahoo! gets away with this,” said one large shareholder. “Yang is toast.”

Bt dropping Microsoft’s attempted takeover, Ballmer, decided not to pursue a hostile takeover of Yahoo!, something the CEO had promised when the Yahoo! board missed Ballmer’s deadline eight days ago.

Ballmer said Yahoo!’s promise to enter into a search agreement with Google, the No. 1 search company, would have made Yahoo! “undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.”

The deal, which would allow Yahoo! to carry Google ads, “would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system,” Ballmer said in the letter.

“This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them,” Ballmer added. “This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.”

The takeover, had it been successful, would have recast the power structure of the Internet by forming a more formidable rival to Google, the leader of the $41 billion paid search business.

Yahoo! had hoped its new search technology, called Panama, would help shrink the gap between Google and itself, the No. 2 company in search. But Panama was a disappointment and Google’s dominance over Internet advertising remains.

Amazon.com Intros Service Allowing Purchases Via Text Message

Amazon.com has bridged the link (no seo pun intended) between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley this week, sending a shot heard round the internet, that mobile transactions and marketing have arrived Amazon.com style on your cell phones.

The new service, called TextBuyIt, lets Amazon.com customers search, find & buy products in less than one minute via text message through Amazon’s Web site. Using Amazon’s service simply requires consumers to send a text message to “AMAZON” (262966) with the product name, search term, UPC or ISBN.

Amazon will send a message in rerply that includes options to buy one or more of the items, send a request more information about the listed item or any other that Amazon carries, you can also get help. Once Amazon receives a text messaged order, the retailer calls the customer’s phone to confirm. On approval, Amazon processes and ships the purchased items to the shipping address.

Advertisers are always looking for more methods for consumers to find & purchase their products or services because they are counting on impulsive behavior on the part of cell phone consumers. On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced easy search features and voice recognition in oneSearch 2.0, attempting to cut down the time and effort it takes to find information on restaurants, retailers, flight information and more.

Consumers are happily addicted to thumbing text messages to each other. In 2007, U.S. cell phone subscribers sent 48.1 billion of them –up from 9.8 billion in 2005, according to a study released this week by the wireless trade association CTIA.

It remains to be seen if Wall Street will find the link between mobile financial transactions and marketing and advertising, advertising agencies have.

Zaw Thet, CEO of 4info of Palo Alto, Calif., says the “dream goal” for marketers means closing the financial transaction from the mobile device.

“Amazon won’t change the industry, but it’s an important first step,” he says. “It signals other retailers they must provide mobile commerce. Banks have been introducing services. The technology they use makes it easier to advertise and market to consumers because they have found a method to get people through the purchase funnel.”

Amazon will be able to more easily track marketing and advertising campaigns. If Amazon targets adults 18 to 25 with incentives to buy the latest Video Game, it would likely ask thier shoppers to text a keyword to a short code.

Amazon could then track not only companies that place advertisements, but also shoppers who text a keyword to complete the transaction. “Keyword recognition will track the ads through the mobile phone to the purchase,” Thet says. “Madison Avenue is a whole different world from Silicon Valley, and it helps to understand both.”

Top 10 Stores For Electronics

When marketing affiliate programs knowing where your target market may be headed is always a nice bit of information to have at your disposal.

Below is the changing tide it seems from brick & mortar big shots to online ease!

How likely is it that you would recommend this store for electronics to a friend?

* Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.Source: BIGresearch

1,000,000s of Businesses without Google PageRank!!!!

That’s right there are literally 1,000,000s of Businesses without Google PageRank!!!!

In New York City alone there are over 250,000 businesses without Google PageRank contributing nearly $4.5 billion in tax revenues to the city.. (2002 Stats)
Can you imagine how much money these businesses are earning without any Google PageRank?

If you can then you are much more intelligent than 99% of the so called business people running around online and who actually panic & fret over their business being alloted a stupid green ingot value to be assigned by who they believe is the savior to their business aspirations the almighty Google.com

Just because all the Forest Gumps in the world can’t find a better solution to building a business online or offline does not mean we all need to follow in their shoes.

I challenge you to go out into the village, town, or city where you live, and see how many businesses are alive and well without having a silly value assigned to them by a search engine.

Many of those businesses were in existence before PageRank and doing quite well without a silly green ingot value.

If your business is not doing well or your stomach twists and turns because your business suffered a green ingot devaluation, visit with a serious marketing company that can help you build a business online!

Microsoft wins Facebook

In a great win for Microsoft the software giant announced Wednesday that is investing $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook.com — The deal concludes that the social network is valued at a huge $15 billion. Beating out Google, Microsoft also won exclusive global rights to sell third-party banner ads on Facebook.

To put this in perspective for everyone, you know I have to toss in the reality, the Microsoft wins Facebook deal is reportedly expecting a profit of $30 million on revenue of $150 million. So the $15 billion valuation is based on earnings of just 10% of that amount.

A lot of people were thinking Google would win this one but Microsoft has an agreement to sell ads on Facebook in the U.S. since August of last year so it seemed they were in the pocket already. Another smart move by microsoft was to expand the agreement internationally because 60% of Facebook’s nearly 50 million registered users live outside the USA.

Microsoft believes that user base is on track to exceed 200 million and eventually 300 million members, said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, during a conference call Wednesday.

On the call, Johnson downplayed what one analyst called the “faddishness” of Facebook. “Figured with [Facebook’s] monetization opportunities,” said Johnson, “you could very quickly get to the valuation” of $15 billion.

Analysts agreed that whatever Facebook’s prospects, social networking can no longer be considered a fad. “These are seasoned companies making well-thought-out investments,” said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank of the deal.

As you may know Microsoft owns a branded social networking offering, “Windows Live Spaces,” which has attracted an audience of 9.8 million, according to comScore.

Johnson said he was pleased with Microsoft’s ability to monetize Facebook’s network thus far, but that there are “many initiatives underway to drive that higher.”

Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s vice president of operations and chief revenue officer, did allude to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of aQuantive, saying the deal was “a deep strategic move for them.”

With this latest victory, Microsoft still faces an uphill battle against Google in the war for online ad dollars. In its fiscal year ending in June, Microsoft’s online ad revenue rose 21% to $1.84 billion. During the same period, Google’s ad revenue totaled $13.3 billion.

It seems this is also another shot at Myspace which was once the dominant social network but it seems first to market in the social networking space may not have been the best idea given the amount of negative press they were under initially.

NFL Marketing Chief Resigns

Lisa Baird resigned her job as the senior Vice President of Marketing for the National Football League. (NFL) Lisa worked for IBM, General Motors & Proctor & Gamble prior to working for the NFL. Lisa will continue her work till the end of the year.

This is a loss for the NFL & other corporations, as Lisa has tremendous insight, and is often found at the forefront of using new marketing methods, or using marketing to combat negative publicity.

Two examples of Lisa’s shrewd marketig savvy was the NFL’s decision to use personal generated content which found it’s way to the big game with a commercial starring Don Cheadle which was shown during the Super Bowl.

Another of Lisa’s advanced marketing strategies was to fight negative publicity the league was facing recently with the Michael Vick dog fighting situation. Lisa ran an ad campaign using the NFL players who work in the various communities and featuring their contributions.

Lisa is leaving to spend time at home, having spent the last four plus years at home earning a very nice income I would say that is a great thing for her to do. Seeing how smart she is being at home will allow the creativity to grow further.