My former affiliatetracking.de site has become peterglaeser.com!

I killed my old personal blog because I hardly found enough time to publish anything there. And it also makes a lot more sense to publish English content on a .com instead of a .de domain.

I put a 301 redirect to the new domain. But just to be sure, please update your bookmarks and feed URLs.

Germany’s leading affiliate network affilinet is expanding to another neighboring country: the Netherlands.
They have just launched the Dutch version of their site. Too bad that the domain affilinet.nl belongs to GSMPlaza, a Dutch vendor of mobile phones and contracts.

Zanox doesn’t want any new affiliates, it seems. At least they don’t want to pay for them.

Zanox used to run a a snowball system as you might know it from multi-level marketing. Existing affiliates that acquired new affiliates received a percentage of the new affiliates’ regular commissions on top of their own direct commissions. So if you focused on bringing quality affiliates to zanox regularly, your monthly income would grow steadily. Some of the pioneers of affiliate marketing made a real fortune out of this and made their personal dreams come true.

Now zanox have decided that these alpha affiliates that continuously bring in new affiliates aren’t good enough for them anymore. They’re getting rid of the lifetime payout and now pay you a lousy 6 to 8 euros. Also these leads are not confirmed for payout unless the newly acquired affiliate generates at least 50 euros worth of commissions.

Let’s have a closer look at this: If an affiliate earns the threshold of 50 euros from an advertiser, zanox is earning somewhere between 10 and 15 euros from that advertiser already. That is their agency fee, so to say the cost for using the affiliate network, which is usually between 20 and 30 percent of the rewarded affiliate commissions. What are they giving to the affiliate? 6 to 8 euros. Now you figure out why that is!

If you want to read a success story of a retired alpha affiliate, visit Stefan Zwanzger at affiliate.de.

Don’t leave for the weekend before upgrading your WordPress blogs to version 2.5.1. The security update has just come out.

I’m super busy with client work so I don’t have time to blog at the moment. In the mean time I would like to recommend you a post by Timo Aden of Google. He is explaining the secrets of the new version of the Google Analytics code. The post itself is in German but if you read the code you should understand what he’s talking about. Go to Timo’s post about the new code.

Gratulations to Hungary. Yahoo! is acquiring Indextools. The company offers a hosted web analytics suite including sophisticated conversion tracking. The company and the servers are based in Hungary. They’ve got sales people in Western Europe and North America as well.

Indextools was founded by Marton Szoke, a Hungarian entrepreneur with a degree in business administration but also a lot of technical knowledge. He spent some time studying in Vienna so he’s also fluent in German. Marton is a great guy and one of the very few CEO’s that take part in the development and management of their product.

After Google acquired Urchin, their analytics system became Google Analytics and also got linked with Adwords. Now that Microsoft introduced their own analytics solution, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Indextools as the future Yahoo! Analytics. The only problem: Currently Indextools is a fee-based service and clients with lots of traffic pay Indextools big money. I can’t imagine th

Yahoo! are working on a new advertising network. To me it looks quite similar to the DoubleClick network that was recently acquired by Google. Here is a video preview of Yahoo! AMP.

In his keynote at the last Affiliate Summit, Jason Calcanis described how affiliate marketers, or better spammers, destroyed a whole medium. The usenet provided a great platform for online discussions. It supports most features that you can find in emails: threads, attachements, (fake) addresses, you name it. I remember the days when the usenet was pretty much the only place where people gathered for discussions on the internet.

However, around the year 2000 most news groups got polluted with so many spam posts that people started leaving the usenet and moved on to discussion boards on websites. From a user point of view that was a step backwards. Instead of reading targeted groups on usenet we now have to monitor hundreds of different sites to stay updated on all these discussions. I think that’s one of the reasons why the use of RSS spread so quickly.

Today the usenet is used mainly by computer nerds that are sophisticated enough to run spam filters in their news readers and use the system also as a file-sharing platform. Normal people don’t use it and internet beginners don’t even know what it is. Today’s teenagers went straight to the world of Internet Explorer, MySpace and Facebook to exchange text.

I think the same thing is about to happen to email. Even with the best spam filters it’s become impossible to keep all the spam away. People are forced to delete stuff from their inboxes and look for real messages in their junk folders manually everday. What a waste of time and money for any economy. Just like with usenet, people are escaping the open email protocol and move to serviced portals.

Instead of exchanging email addresses, people communicate increasingly via social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or XING. The advantage is that they don’t have to keep up with changing email addresses, the contacts will always be there. Usually they can receive messages from approved contacts only, a whitelist system so to say. Compared to email, spam on social networks is still minimal and that’s why people love it. The downside is that different people are registered on different networks. So instead of using my email interface I have to check accounts in five different social networks to communicate.

From a technical standpoint email is still a great service. I like the separation of header and body so that you can view the topic and perhaps read the text of the message without having to download the attached file. That’s especially good for mobile communication. But I think once a solution is found for managing accounts of multiple social networks, email is going to be buried. Let’s see what OpenSocial will contribute.

If you still think email is the internet’s main communication medium, then you’re basically an old-school, web 1.0 person. Ask your 14-year old niece how often she logs on to Facebook and how often she uses email. You’ll be surprised. If you are an affiliate marketer and still spam the crap out of people, you’re not gonna be able to reach many young people soon. It’s like with online vs. offline advertising. Young people hardly buy newspapers and spend more time online than in front of the television.

Usability

Even though Tradedoubler has made a huge step in the right direction, AdSense is still better. For example, Tradedoubler forgot to translate some of the interface words into local languages. Here’s an example of a mixture of a German interface with English wordings:

1:0 in favor of AdSense

Flexibility

Tradedoubler AdMatch lets you do way more stuff than Google AdSense. I like the fact that Tradedoubler also employs the product databases of its affiliate programs. However, Tradedoubler’s inventory of advertisers is minimal compared to Google’s. So even though Tradedoubler offers more in terms of looks, Google offers you way more matching ads.
2:0 in favor of AdSense

Technical Performance

I’m not impressed by AdMatch’s performance. It takes longer to load than AdSense, especially when it needs to examine a URL for the first time. Also, on Internet Explorer 7.0 on my Vista machine, AdMatch fails to display the ads under certain conditions. I can see that text is moved down and space reserved by the ad, but I can just see a blank space. I could reproduce that error on another machine.
3:0 in favor of AdSense

Conclusion

AdMatch is buggy! And Tradedoubler doesn’t have enough ads to be able to provide a good match for all these content sites out there. AdMatch is worth a try for those who run Tradedoubler affiliate programs already. Don’t use it if you make most of your money from contextual advertising!

Today Tradedoubler announced that they would offer a contextual advertising creative format called AdMatch, promising a “market-leading contextual advertising solution”:

AdMatch launches across Europe on 31st March and is unique in its ability to serve ads across three separate ad formats: text, product and display. By scanning the content of web pages and facilitating the placement of ads alongside contextually relevant website content, AdMatch will help to improve the relevancy of advertising on your site …

Technically it seems to me that this is just a mix of the existing AdTool (2004) and a spider bot. The business idea behind it is good and other players have had great success with their contextual advertising solutions. Individual merchants such as eBay and Amazon as well as ad networks such as Google (AdSense), affilinet (affilimatch) or now Pepperjam have been offering this for years already. They all have a great inventory of advertisers on board.

But I’m not sure if Tradedoubler has got a product and creative library big enough for the world-wide web. Pepperjam or even AdSense might be the better solutions here, especially when it comes to usability. The Tradedoubler interface is a pain in the neck. But hey, you can prove me wrong.