I just got back from the opening event for zanox’ new Global Alliance Partners Campus. It’s an office space right next to the zanox headquarters serving as an incubator for new publishers. As far as I understand affiliates can use the zanox premises to work on their projects for using zanox as their affiliate and tracking network in exchange.

At the event zanox also promised the development of various APIs in order to let advertisers and publishers access as much information as possible without the usual web interface. In theory developers would then be able to create as much as their own sub-affiliate networks.

All this is a great step forward and convinced me that they are Germany’s most relevant affiliate network. They may not be the number one in terms of traffic yet, but they will be. Competitors are too far behind and way too slow to catch up. Good stuff, guys.

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.

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.

ebay decided to leave affiliate networks and start their own in-house affiliate network. Today they announced to leave Commission Junction. I would say that’s a big hit for CJ. I wonder how German Affilinet will deal with this as ebay is a major income source for Affilinet.

I have to say that ebay’s move makes perfect sense. The company is capable enough to run a tracking system on their own and adapt it to the needs of their affiliates. Here are some examples of the advantages of their in-house system:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

Instead of publishing countless videos that nobody wants to see, zanox have finally started blogging. Professional affiliates work efficiently. They won’t watch hours of videos with little information. They consume information via RSS including filter rules and all that. Well done.

Some consolidation on the German affiliate network market: YOC AG, the company behind belboon, acquires adbutler. For the moment both networks will remain separate. But I’m sure adbutler will be integrated into belboon at some point.

Affiliateboy Markus Kellermann, Head of Affiliate Marketing at explido WebMarketing, writes that affiliate network belboon is about to introduce a post-view tracking solution. Apparently they will be counting conversions within 24 hours after the impression of a creative in favor of the affiliate. Let’s wait for the official release.

What do large companies do when they identify a problem and can’t solve it themselves? They spend a lot of money for somebody else to do the job or acquire somebody that has done the job already.

AOL seems to be in desperate need of a European affiliate network. Last year the owners of Tradedoubler rejected AOL’s offer. This year an acquisition seems to go through: buy.at. It’s a UK-based affiliate network with rather basic technical features. Therefore I think that the 150 million dollars are overrated, just like the 900 million for Tradedoubler.

Long time no news from Swedish online media company Tradedoubler. Now they finally decided to expand to Asia with an office in Tokyo. Also they introduced their own search marketing tool called td Searchware 4, formerly known as BidBuddy by the acquired company The Technology Works.