As you know for a while I’ve been working for Sponsormob, the CPA Network for the Mobile Internet. We’ve released our download and conversion tracking for iPhone applicatiions. This means we can track installations of mobile apps on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad.

Ads will be placed within other applications or on the (mobile) web. This is a 100% in-house solution and proprietary technoloy. While most of the online marketing world is still struggling with non-web transactions we went the extra mile and made it happen. We’re going to expand this to other mobile device platforms as well.

Thanks to Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit and James Coops of Mobyaffiliates for the buzz. You should check out their blogs as well:

• Shawn Collins about Sponsormob
• Mobyaffiliates about Sponsormob

Ten years ago they were one of the world’s biggest internet service providers. Remeber the numerous free installation CDs they distributed like crazy? Some of them even built ash trays out of them. But that’s another story. At some point they also purchased CompuServe, remember that one too?

AOL sold their dial-up business and kept what was then very profitable for them: online advertising. They owned high-volume sites such as their own aol.com, simply because they made it the default site for their customers.

Ten years later things have changed. Advertisers aren’t willing and able to pay outrageous CPM rates anymore. That paired with some serious miscalculations internally led to a huge operational loss in the company. Their display advertising business wasn’t working anymore.

AOL is downsizing, getting rid of many advertising sales organizations. This includes Advertising.com aka Platform A in Germany, Europe’s largest display market. They’re looking for other companies to take over their business now and are in talks with the unions about layoffs.

So what do we learn from this? Well, in online media you can’t survive with a ten-year old business model. The market value of any asset slowly but surely disappears. Once you’ve reached the stage where you’re really comfortable you need to continue developing new stuff. Otherwise you fall behind because there are more smart people out there than you think.

For about a year the only reason for me to use Windows is iTunes and iPod/iPhone. Most of my other tasks could get done easily by a Mac or a free Linux distribution. Tomorrow I’m going to bury Windows and use the free disk space for my existing Ubuntu installation. For development and office work I’m switching over to Ubuntu, multimedia and iPhone stuff will be done on a Mac.

The landing page has geo-targeting built in. And when you access it from a German IP address it takes you to a horribly translated version on gut-free.com. If you’re a German speaker, sit back and have a good laugh:

I’ve just returned from the NOKIA Night of the Proms at the O2 World in Berlin. I’m still impressed so I thought of writing a few words about the show.

It’s an almost four-hour concert/show with a mixture of classical music and a number of pop/rock acts. They used to be famous 20-30 years ago and are obviously less expensive these days. So it’s actually possible to get them perform in one tour. Almost all songs are accompanied by a full symphonic orchestra and a choir.

In my opinion the most outstanding musician was John Miles. He started out with an amazing interpretation of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” where he accompanied himself on the piano and threw in a killer guitar solo.

The range of John’s voice is incredible even though he turned 60 this year. When he performed a jazz tune it sounded as if Frank Sinatra was singing. He hit every single note, not a single mistake. This is truly one of the world’s top musicians. He finished his part with his “Music” (was my first love …).

The other highlight was Roxette, the Swedish pop duo of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle that was big in the 80s and 90s. They were big in Europe and became famous in the U.S. with the Pretty Woman soundtrack (with Richard Gere faking on the piano in the music video).

In 2002 Marie was diagnosed with a brain tumor, got treatment and is probably still taking strong medication. She still doesn’t look alright, can’t walk much and couldn’t jump up and down the stage as she used to ten years ago. Her voice is still unique and sounds like her. But it’s lost a lot of range and she had problems hitting the high pitches. However, Per still rocks the house and made up for Marie’s limitations.

Thank you for putting this show together. This was the second time I went. I will certainly come back next year.

There is only one exception to the rule: Permission to store or read cookies is not mandatory when their use is “strictly necessary” for the provision of an “explicitely requested” service. That means, if a user is clicking through an online shop and puts items in the virtual shopping basked, the site may use cookies. However, the site may not read or write cookies for the purpose of third-party advertising as users don’t explicitely ask for the display of advertising. In theory that means that any site serving ads will need to ask for users’ consent.

Full version here: DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL amending Directive 2002/22/EC on universal service and users’ rights relating to electronic communications networks and services, Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector and Regulation (EC) No 2006/2004 on cooperation between national authorities responsible for the enforcement of consumer protection laws

If the laws will actually be enforced it will mean the end for a lot of business. Many sites out there derive their revenues from consent-less advertising only. This also includes Facebook, YouTube and so on. As most ad servers out there are completely based on cookies, these companies would have to ask their users for permission to show them “well-chosen offers of partners”. This would also give users the option to choose an ad-free YouTube or Facebook. Who is going to be paying for the service then? Will casual communities introduce subscription fees just like LinkedIn?

The consent requirement for the use of browser cookies also applies to analytics. All sites using Google Analytics, Omniture etc. will need to ask for explicit permission to store and read cookies too. This however isn’t all that bad. No matter which website I visit, I always see Google Analytics requests in the status bar of the browser. They can track a user across the whole internet which is quite scary actually. At this time nobody is asking for my permission.

I’m not sure if the directive will really become effective national laws. There is too much money in online advertising and I think a lot of companies will begin some heavy lobbying soon. The new regulation would kill some of the greatest innovators out there. The other question is how the authorities will actually be enforcing the laws. Anyhow, cookie-less tracking techniques will become more and more important.

What would Google do? What did Google do? Go mobile.

Back in the dark ages of online marketing it was alright to associate an online transaction with the last traffic source previous to that purchase. Having some data was better than having nothing. But customer behavior and online marketing techniques have evolved. Also, online marketing budgets are significantly higher these days, so we need to be a lot more acurate now. All this lets the principle of “last cookie wins” look antiquated.

Here are some facts I picked up at the latest a4uexpo affiliate marketing conference in London. During the “Affiliate Apocalypse Panel” Julia Stent of Vodafone UK shared some insightful data with us:

• In general there is a 20% overlap between affiliate and paid search traffic.
• In only 21% of all affiliate sales, the affiliate is the only person involved in generating that sale.
• For 72% of online sales in the travel industry where a user has visited an affiliate site at some point, affiliates were not rewarded due to the last-cookie-principle.

Currently we attribute a transaction (lead or sale) to one traffic source only. But given the previous facts, that actually ignores valuable data and leads us to miss the bigger picture completely. All marketing activities are inter-related. That goes for offline vs. online and also for within the online sphere.

However, today’s world, especially in online marketing, is still driven by the old principle of “that sale is mine.” In numerous companies I’ve seen internal fights about this, display vs. search vs. affiliate managers. Instead of cooperating they often work against each other, accusing each other of stealing sales. It’s usually the affiliate marketing people that have to defend their affiliates and themselves.

“That sale is mine” can no longer be our mindset. Instead we need to find ways to distribute commissions among all parties involved in the decision-making and buying process in a fair manner. We need to measure the true influence of an advertising channel and the parties involved instead of relying on the last-cookie-counts principle.

This would also remove the issue of chasing the last click, something that affiliates have become extremely good at through coupon sites or cookie spamming in the form of layer ads, pop-up windows, adware and other forms of forced clicks.

What we need is cross-channel tracking on the side of merchants and affiliate networks turning more into technical solution providers. We need to be able to split commissions for the same transaction among several traffic sources. Something we probably won’t see anytime soon, but this is where it needs to go.

1. visibility of creatives

The current technical set-up for post-view tracking doesn’t ensure that cookies are set only if a banner is actually seen by a user. I don’t think it’s fair to give an affiliate credit for a post-view sale triggered by a banner that was placed at the very bottom of the screen. Most likely this banner didn’t have anything to do with the sale. A multitude of banners below the fold of  the screen is simply cookie spamming.

2. cookie switches

Merchants working with more than one affiliate network or tracking tool must expand their cookie switch from clicks to impressions. Otherwise the same post-view transaction will be tracked by more than one network.

This essentially means that merchants need to have their own post-view tracking running. For most companies that’s quite unrealistic though because they either don’t have the skills to make it happen or don’t want to bear the extra cost of counting every single banner impression.

3. lack of transparency

Currently there is no transparency in the use of post-view tracking. There are networks that simply turned for it on for certain programs without approval by the merchants. About a year ago most networks proclaimed to kick cookie-spamming affiliates out of their networks. Now they seem to re-introduce cookie spamming again through the back door by the use of post-view tracking.

4. lack scientific proof

I am not aware of any independent study proving an increase of profits for merchants by the use of post-view tracking. Yes, of course more sales are being tracked, but in most cases they are just “stolen” elsewhere. There is a significant number of transactions that would have taken place with or without postview.

On Tuesday between 2pm and 4pm you’ll have the opportunity to get some free one-to-one consulting on mobile marketing and mobile advertising. You will be able to find me in the expert surgery zone. Details can be found on the a4uexpo blog.

Google call it “view through to conversion”. And as far as I understand them, this is going to be available on the content network only.

They are using a 30-day cookie for postview. I hope nobody optimizes based on these numbers

I am not against post-view per se. I think this is a good approach to rewarding affiliates that provide advertising value even without producing clicks. But the way it is being conducted by most affiliates and networks these days is NOT how it was originally intended to be. Currently it does more harm than good. That’s why I support SuperClix fully in this regard.

In theory, post-view tracking is supposed to reward affiliates for sales that originated not in clicks but in impressions of creatives. For example, a user would see a banner and a couple hours later go to the merchant’s website because he remembered the ad. In this case it would be absolutely fair to pay that affiliate a commission for a sale because he contributed directly to the transaction.

In today’s practice however, I would say that there is little connection bewteen the impression of the ad and a post-view sale. Most transactions that are considered post-view sales are purely based on cookie-spamming. Why?

Post-view affiliates know that they can’t make money legitimately. That’s why they create multi-merchant banners, displaying say three ads (and dropping three cookies) at one time. And to make this even worse, these banners contain rotations, so that new ads are being shown every ten seconds (thus new cookies are being dropped). And the smaller the ads are the less likely they are going to create a real advertising effect.

So merchants, don’t get fooled by what networks, agencies and affiliates tell you. At this stage, post-view tracking is still a rip-off and a bunch of crap. There are no standards yet, it’s the wild west days. These days you will not make more money just because of post-view tracking. The opposite is true, you will end up spending more.

You will need a server or webspace that supports PHP. Create a PHP file containing the following:

<?php
if ($_GET["source"]=="youtube") {
if ($_GET["user"]!="") {
$url = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/".$_GET["user"]."/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published";
} else if ($_GET["q"]!="") {
$url = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?q=".urlencode($_GET["q"])."&alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published";
}
}
if ($url!="") {
$xml = file_get_contents($url);
$items = explode("<item>",$xml);
$output = $items[0];
for ($i=1;$i<count($items);$i++) {
$tmp = explode("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=",$items[$i]);
$tmp = explode("\"",$tmp[1]);
$tmp = $tmp[0];
$output.= "<item><enclosure url=\"http://www.youtubemp4.com/video/".$tmp.".mp4\" type=\"video/mp4\"/>".$items[$i];
}
echo $output;
}
?>

Video podcast of a certain YouTube user:

http://your.file.name?source=youtube&user=USERNAME

Video podcast based on a search on YouTube:

http://your.file.name?source=youtube&q=SEARCH+THIS

This script makes use of a site named youtubemp4.com which spits out the MP4 file of any given YouTube video.

While planning this event, the organizers apparently forgot that another great trade show is taking place at the same time: ad:tech London.

I will be exhibiting with a booth in London, so I’ll have to give the German show a miss. Sorry, maybe next time.

However, what struck me is the fact that Affilinet will continue to the following things for eBay here:

• program management
• affiliate scouting
• program development

Now, isn’t this what we usually describe as “affiliate agency services” or “outsourced program management” (OPM)?

Granted, all networks are more than just technical solution providers. They try to push their affiliates into the most profitable programs, share data, and so on. Everyone is out there to get the most out of things.

However, networks must maintain a minimum level of neutrality. I think with Affilinet  openly providing full service to a single merchant they’ve lost their neutrality. I’m a strong believer in the separation of powers between merchants, affiliates, networks, and agencies. Fishy stuff will happen whenever you mix up the roles.

Ask yourself: If you were a merchant, would you run an affiliate program on a network which is also the full-service agency of your competitor?

I’ve just returned from Leipzig where I attented the Affiliate Stammtisch. This networking event took place at the Moritzbastei in the city center, a medieval fortress-like building which looks like it was part of the ancient city wall. Wardrobe and restrooms probably used to be dungeons. At least they’ve kept the metal doors from back then. Nice location, perfect for the size of the event.

Affiliate Stammtisch was organized by Martin Dorst’s online marketing agency. They’re based in Leipzig and serve not only national retailers but also work for regional and local clients which I find great. Many agencies compete over the same clients, usually the large enterprises. But I believe the small and medium-sized companies are a huge market too.

I liked that they didn’t have a formal agenda for the evening. People go to networking events because they want to talk and not because they want to listen to lengthy presentations. Some of the sponsors didn’t even show up, probably because it was a Friday evening.

But most importantly, I really liked the fact that Martin wasn’t trying to turn the evening into a self-promotion show for his company. You know, at similar events organized by agencies they’re just using this for hardcore selling. Some companies don’t realize that they need to build reputation by action and not words. Martin understands this concept very well and I’m sure he and his team got something out of their work without having to push hard.

So thanks to Martin, Alexander and the rest of the team. I’m looking forward to next year’s event.

Programs vs. Offers

Affiliate networks are usually about merchants. Some of the programs bombard you with every possible banner, link and product feed they have and don’t really help you much in making a choice. CPA networks on the contrary are usually about landing pages. A CPA offer may have a couple of landing pages, but that’s it. Lately the affiliate networks have adopted the CPA trend and started what they call campaigns. They’re basically integrating landing-page-only programs into their portfolio.

Direct Relationship vs. Blind Network

In a traditional affiliate network the merchant (or the agency) has direct contact to the affiliate. In a CPA network the affiliate talks only to the network, not the merchant. Usually the merchant doesn’t know the identity of the affiliate either.

Approval Process vs. Instant Start

Most affiliate programs have an admission process, many of them approve affiliates manually. In a CPA network you have no direct relationship with the advertiser, so there is no approval process. Affiliates can start right away and pull their codes. Don’t you hate how long some affiliate managers sometimes take to approve you?

Open vs. Confirmed Transactions

Probably every affiliate network can assign leads and sales a certain status: unconfirmed, confirmed, denied. I can understand the point of the merchants as they only want to pay for transactions for which the customer has actually paid. But affiliates, especially those that do media buying, need to know their final revenue by the end of the day. They can’t do effective media buying if they don’t know much money they actually made the previous day. So it’s no surprise that most CPA networks don’t get into this. They solve this for example by paying for every transaction but with a lower payout.

Secrets vs. Transparency

There are still a number of affiliate networks that keep the performance of their programs secret. On the other hand, CPA networks are usually brutally honest and give you access to the metrics. Not only that you see the stuff in the interface. The other day I received an email from a CPA network with a list of all eCPCs for their search offers. I’ve never received this from any affiliate network before, even when I asked them for it.

Conclusion

Very simple. If you are a content publisher, stay with the good old-fashioned affiliate networks. They provide you with all the fancy ads that you can throw on your sites. Also, the really big brands want to be in control of their affiliates so you won’t find very many of them on CPA networks. However, if you are a media buyer who wants to drive hardcore sales, go for the CPA networks.

Check out my Mobile Space podcast on GeekCast.fm!

Advertisers usually group their online marketing teams mainly by traffic source: search marketing, display campaigns, affiliate marketing. Back in the dark ages affiliates were primarily web site owners who would place text links or banners on their own sites to make some extra cash. These days many affiliates have turned into full-time entrepreneurs who have expanded their dominance also to search engines and social media.

Pascal’s point is that the media agencies and not the affiliates will be the key players in the future. They’re in close contact with the advertisers, they administer the big budgets and they’re actually becoming better at what they do. At the same time, small- and medium-sized advertisers will run their activities more and more in-house instead of through an affiliate or search marketing agency.

So what will happen to affiliates? A lot of their territory will be taken away by large agencies or the advertiser itself. For example in search marketing, why should advertisers pay for the profit of the affiliates and the affiliate networks if they can pull the sales in themselves? In some cases that would lower the cost of acquisition by 50%. Same thing with Google. They’re going after affiliates big time these days because they want the other 50% of the advertiser’s budget.

With the redundance of traditiional affiliates, especially in search marketing, the traditional affiliate networks are going to be dinosaurs. If they’re not changing their role to a technical solution provider they’re likely to die out. The winners are going to be the media agencies. They can combine large budgets of several advertisers and that way pay a lot less for ad network traffic.

The key to survival and growth for affiliates is specialization. Affiliates need to find niches where they do not have to compete with large advertisers and agencies. How about mobile?

For example let’s have a look at zanox. They’ve come out with an application store that encourages affiliates to make their own tools available to other affiliates as well. At first this may sound like a great idea.

But when you really think about it you start to realize that they’re trying to fool us here. In my opinion this application store is nothing else but their attempt to lower the internal IT cost and create some extra PR buzz on the side.

The message that zanox is sending out is: “We don’t want to innovate internally anymore. Dear affiliates, do the dirty work for us, please. And no, we can’t guarantee you any revenue from sharing your work with your competitors. Go and figure it out yourself.”

Maybe I’m missing the bigger picture here, but I don’t understand why successful affiliates should make their self-made tools available to competitors in the form of other affiliates or merchants.

After UK-based AffiliateFuture the German 2nd-tier affiliate network belboon has also introduced a tracking technology based on local shared objects, also widely known as “Flash cookies”. Back then AffiliateFuture observed a 7% increase in conversions. I’d be really interested to see belboon’s figures.

I haven’t heard of any large affiliate network implementing something similar. For example Commission Junction has become so slow over the years. I take these types of networks are going extinct like the dinosaurs at some point.

Flash cookies are somewhat similar to regular browser cookies. Essentially they are files stored on a user’s computer. The main differences are:

1. Traditional browser cookies are stored in separate folders for different browsers. Flash cookies are always stored in the same folder, no matter which browser you’re using. That way the tracking works even if a user switches between browsers.
2. The browsers can only delete the cookies in “their” folders. They don’t auto-delete the Flash cookies.
3. Unless users block Flash elements, the tracking still works even if they run their browsers in a super-privacy mode.
4. Traditional cookies follow an open standard. Flash cookies are controlled by one company: Adobe.

Mobile Space podcast on GeekCast.fm

You’re the right candidate if you have exceptional online advertising sales experience, either selling direct to client or preferably to media agencies. You will know instinctively how to pitch to clients and possess the imagination and knowledge to create truly integrated campaigns for key brands.

You will sell across our clients’ portfolio of consumer websites and mobile (WAP) sites. Selling everything from display (banners, skyscrapers, MPUs, eyeblasters and other rich formats) through to online sponsorship, branded content and advertorials, you will be comfortable with metrics of CPM, CPC and CPA.

The jobs are based in central Berlin, Germany. Offices are located within walking distance to Berlin’s coolest bars and clubs. Access to public transportation is nearby too.

We work with many international clients and publishers and can offer great progression with an exciting company. Anyone interested feel free to get in touch.

To solve this issue I decided to move as many processes into the cloud as possible. Data that I have to be able to access are stored on a server that I also have physical access to. I do not save any files that I regularly work with on a specific client machine anymore. Having my files on a server also solves the issue of backups.

Now I’m in process of replacing as much client software as possible by browser-based services. For example, my calendar, tasks and contacts are stored on Mobical. My cell phone also synchronizes nicely with Mobical. Email are done through RoundCube, our company task and project management system is TaskFreak (both PHP/MySQL-based).

All these products re free, and you don’t have to sell your soul to Google in order to be able to use them. If you have anything else please feel free to share.

Seriously, cloud computing is the way to go. But all these app stores for mobile devices actually make us go back to the past instead of progress to the future. In the year 2009, why would I ever want to install a piece of software on a physical device that I have to replace at least every other year? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Buying software is old-school. Subscribing to a web/cloud-based service is the future.

I can understand that they want to improve their user experience and get rid of affiliate spam. However, with this new rule they also keep advertisers from absolutely legitimate testing.

For instance many advertisers test example.com vs. uk.example.com vs. example.co.uk vs. example.net. I’ve seen huge changes in click-through rates just by choosing the right domain for a specific audience.

And when it comes to mobile ads, advertisers would like to be able to test whether m.example.com or example.mobi or even just example.com generates the highest click-through rate.

With the new policy in place all these tests are going to be outlawed. I suppose they don’t want people to create multiple ad groups per keyword or use multiple AdWords accounts. But at the minute I think these are the only options.

I’m convinced that the mobile web will experience a great gain in popularity and importance in the next years. To all those of you who still believe the wired internet will rule the world forever, you’re gonna be dead meat in five years.

Well, not quite. But outdated distribution channels like over-the-air television or old-school business models like CPM advertising are slowly but surely going to die out. Mobile internet usage is definitely a new trend and I’ve decided to jump onto that train. So wish me luck.

I’ve just been forwarded an email from a partner who is doing a lot of PPC in the mobile content industry. Google will require mobile content providers and their affiliates to put the price and billing interval for subscription services in the actual AdWords ads. Quote:

In the coming weeks [...] we will require text and image ads for these services to display the price and billing interval (such as per week or per month) in the ad text, e.g. ‘£5.99/month’. We will no longer accept text or image ads that don’t contain the price and billing interval when promoting mobile content services. When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy.

The guy is seriously scared and concerned about his income now. For more than five years he has been living off mobile content stuff as an affiliate. The only advise I can give him is to move on to other niches. Mobile content has become a somewhat outdated product anyways. I wonder for how much longer people will actually be willing to pay money for this.

Anyways, I just wanted to take this instance as an occasion to reiterate three fundamental principles in affiliate marketing:

1. Never ever ever rely on Google alone. It’s never good to bet all your money on one horse. If you want to generate additional profit from AdWords campaigns, that’s fine. But the core of your business must be independent of the big G.
2. Do not copy but innovate. Focus on niches that are up-and-coming and not the ones that are going down the hill. This way you will generate much more sustainable profit.
3. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. Invest in new ideas and test them to prepare yourself for the future.

• Judith Lewis – SEO Director, i-level
• Shakil Khan- co-founder and Managing Director, Card Smart
• Missy Ward – co-founder, Affiliate Summit
• Ciaran Norris – SEO & Social Media Director, altogether digital
• Todd Crawford, ToddTalks.com
• Marcus Tandler, Mediadonis
• Joris Toonders – Managing Director, Yonego
• Joost de Valk – Founder, Yoast.com
• Jon Myers – Head of Search, MediaVest Group Ltd
• Kieron Donoghue – Director, UK Offer Media Ltd
• Mike Allen – CEO, Shopping Bargains
• Matthew Wood – Managing Director, existem
• Irfon watkins – CEO, Coull
• Peter Glaeser, Sponsormob
• Kevin Edwards, Strategy Director, Affiliate Window
• Julia Stent – Affiliate Manager, Vodafone

The Amsterdam trade show is a continuation of the very successful a4uexpo London. There were a bunch of Dutch and German guys at the UK events, so it makes perfect sense to organize another event on the continent. However, the show will be interesting for British online marketers too. Nevertheless, Amsterdam is always worth a visit.

If you register by the end of February you can save 100 euros. The full pass for affiliates is then only 179 euros!

Hm, I really liked the ShareASale event in Boston. But their 80s party at the Rio reminded me more of a school dance:

So I followed the English crowd (Matt of Existem/a4uexpo, Pete of Affilinet and Matt of iLevel) to Body English, the club event at the Hard Rock Hotel. Thanks to Pete we could skip the crowd:

The buy.at invitation-only party at the Palms Casino was the perfect beginning. Good people, loud music, free drinks and a stunning view. Thanks to Charlie Calabrese for extending the event until 3am.

http://www.slideshare.net/affsum/mobile-web-opportunities-presentation

My session “Mobile Web Opportunities” starts on Monday, January 12th 2009, at 3:30pm. Hope to see you there as well. Don’t be shy and ask many questions.

With belboon affiliates and merchants can view the following details for each tracked lead or sale now:

• the IP address and user agent (browser) of the customer
• the referrering URL
• the date/time of the initial view or click
• the type of cookie used to trigger the transaction (click or post-view)

User identification

Using the IP address and user agent the merchant can check for multiple orders coming from the same person. Especially in lead generation campaigns this will be quite useful to prevent fraud. I just don’t like the fact that belboon is still relying heavily on cookies. There are more sophisticated ways to track already.

Publisher sites

I hate networks and programs that make publishers approve every single domain they’re using. It’s really a pain in the ass. Yes, merchants need to be concerned about their brand so they want to know where their ads show up. But please don’t make it so difficult to do business with you.

By examining the referring URL the merchant will finally be able to identify the publisher’s websites. In theory this allows the network to switch the burden of proof. If they really want to monitor where ads show they should run their own statistics on a regular basis but leave out the pre-approval process.

Time to conversion

Using the time of the initial view or click one can calculate the time between the display/click of the ad and the conversion. This allows the merchant to run statistics on the average time to conversion per affiliate. That way you can determine whether an affiliate is:

• driving quality traffic (conversion within a day)
• cookie-spamming (no conversions within the first weeks)
• using cash-back or ripping you off (conversion within a minute)

Over the years I’ve seen many leads and sales with a conversion time of less than a minute. I’ve always been convinced that these ones are fishy. Especially on large e-commerce sites with complicated check-out processes it’s impossible to get a customer to purchase that quickly. These transactions must be fraud or cash-back (which is in my opinion a type of fraud too).

Well, 2008 has been a great year for me. The end of the year is getting close and I’d like to say thank you to my loyal blog readers as well. So I’ve decided to give away some small presents to you out there.

I’m not going to tell you what it is because it’s supposed to be a small surprise. But I can assure you it’s not an online coupon or anything like that. It’ll be a physical item shipped to your house.

All you need to do is send me an email with your name, your postal address and a comment on what you like or dislike about this blog. The deadline is this Friday, December 5th, 2008.

I’ll be arriving on Friday evening (January 9) and will be leaving on Wednesday afternoon (January 14). If you want to join me on Saturday for a casino tour and a thrilling night out, please get in touch. I’ve heard quite a few things have changed since then. Siegfried & Roy left the Mirage, Treasure Island’s good old pirate show got replaced by “Sirens of TI”, and much more. But hey, nine years for Vegas is like decades for other places.

Even though Shoemoney recommends the Stratosphere, I won’t be staying there. Money-wise it’s certainly one of the best deals but I’d hate to travel all the way back and forth from the Stratosphere to the Rio. Time is just too valuable during these events.

I’ll be speaking about “Mobile Web Opportunities” on Monday, January 12th 2009, at 3:30pm. This is a session aimed at both merchants and affiliates. I’d be happy to see you there.

Here’s a screen shot of the reports section of the AdWords interface. Unfortunately it’s in German because it was sent to me by a friend. But you can figure out yourself that it covers click-to-call (telephone), video and audio ads. Click on the image to see the full version.

But this time McCains “country first” campaign failed. Even though the world is undergoing a serious financial crisis the majority of Americans wanted to make a move towards the future rather than the past. It took the American people eight years to realize that they were being fooled by an old-boys club that was looking after its own profit. But finally they understood what was going on and made their choice very clearly.

So what do we learn from all this about the online industry? Well, I learned that timing is everything. Obama would have failed miserably with his current agenda four years ago. This year he was the right man at the right time. On the other hand, McCain would have won the elections four years ago. People were in a quite protectionist mood back then. But today he lost because he was promoting an outdated product (“country first”).

The bottom line is: If you’re entering the market with a new product, make sure that you’re doing it at the right time. Do not be too early so that nobody knows what you’re talking about. And don’t try to start something that is outdated either.

What I like about my new toy is it’s size: Here you can see that it’s less than half of the size of my old 15.4-inch laptop:

I chose the Linux version because I don’t need Windows for surfing on the web or writing a few documents. I’ve played with Ubuntu for a long time now and absolutely love it. Also I’m in process of getting rid of Windows completely. More on that in a future post.

The pre-installed Xandros Linux sucks. It’s actually capable of doing a lot for you. But the user interface is really for dummies. It took me two minutes to realize that I had to kill it. I downloaded the newest Ubuntu on my USB memory stick and put it on the EEE. The netbook has 1 GB of RAM and an 8 GB solid state disk, something like an internal USB stick. These days you don’t really need more than this to do online work.

I had to connect the EEE PC to my LAN so that it could download a bunch of updates which also got my wireless internet connection working. So within half an hour I had a full Ubuntu Linux netbook. Here is a screenshot (literally) showing Gnome and Firefox:

PHP is a programming language used primarily for websites. It’s relatively easy to learn and you can get by using dirty code, at least in the beginning. The best thing about PHP is that it is a script language. You don’t need to compile the source code which can take a long time if you’re using Java. The PHP interpreter does that for you on the fly when a script is executed. You can change the website instantly and seamlessly so that deployment isn’t really a big issue.

The beauty of Java is that it’s fast because upon execution it’s code has been translated into machine language already. PHP tends to be slower here because it has to translate the code in real time. However, I don’t think using Java instead is a good trade-off. If traffic volume and execution time of PHP-based applications become an issue I just use more servers. Nowadays it’s a lot cheaper to spend money on infrastructure than on switching a platform to Java. You can also speed up PHP big time by using Memcache.

Some of the largest social media properties on the internet have been using PHP from the very beginning: Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg. So you see, it’s possible to scale PHP-based services. You just need to do it right. My point is, if for example Facebook had been written in Java, hardly any of these optional applications would exist and its viral growth wouldn’t have happened.

To validate my point, here’s a picture I took in my room at the Novotel London Excel where I stayed for a4uexpo. I hate the fact that even the entertainment systems of hotels run on Java and do not work:

The crowd of attendees and speakers was quite international. So I ended up hanging around with the German crowd. You guys were fun to be around, especially during the Thames cruise and the drinks at the Novotel afterwards. What happened to Michael? I hadn’t seen him all morning.

I enjoyed a4uexpo a lot and recommend anyone to go. It costs a little bit of money but the investment is definitely worth it. If you’re a beginner it’s really worth attending the sessions. Otherwise you can also hang out in the conference area and get to know new people. Everybody will get something out of the show.

Matt announced that a4uexpo will be expanding to the continent. The first non-UK a4uexpo is going to be in Amsterdam. You should consider Munich or Berlin too.

I’m sure there will be more blog posts, photos and videos published soon. But here are a few pictures from the trade show and the parties:

1. Competition: Google Analytics has a very large marketshare already. I just hate monopolies as they slow down innovation.
2. External campaign tracking: A million times better. External campaigns can be identified by URL parameters or referrer so that merchants can create an overview of all marketing activities (affiliate programs, direct campaigns, search).
3. Internal campaign tracking: An internal tracking system can measure the effectiveness of every single banner on every page.
4. Custom reports: The reporting and customization capabilities of Yahoo! Analytics are a hundred times better.
5. Path analysis: You can follow the complete click path on your sites. Google only offers the pre-defined funnel analysis.
6. Scenario analysis: Much more customizable than Google’s goals with many more filter options too.
7. Email reports: You can schedule regular reports by email with a lot more options for customization.
8. Data protection: Google has too much data already.
9. Server location: As far as I remember servers are located in Hungary where the government can’t access your stuff that easily.
10. Price: It’s free as well.

My journey back from ad:tech London was a nightmare. The air traffic control center for London had a complete computer crash and my beloved airline EasyJet decided to simply cancel the flight and offer me a flight back home three days later. I managed to get one of the last hotel rooms and a flight back home from a different airport three hours away. I do have friends in the area that I would have loved to visit. But after two days of ad:tech I just wanted to sleep and go home.

The weekend before I went to Munich and also paid a visit to the Oktoberfest. We shot a lot of embarassing pictures and videos that I’m not going to post here. Thanks again to Thomas and Katja for hosting three beer-loving ex business partners from Berlin. I really liked the atmosphere and I think I’ll make the Oktoberfest a regular event. It’s truly unique and if you drink well but not too much you’ll have a blast there.

Speaking of Munich, next week I’m gonna be there again, but just for a quick visit at one of the airport bars. I’ll be around at Affiliate NetworkxX, a regular networking evening for German-speaking affiliate marketers. If you happen to recognize me feel free to speak up and have a chat over a beer or two. Hope to meet you soon.

Finally there is going to be a4uexpo, the UK’s largest affiliate marketing conference. London, again. This time I’m flying Lufthansa though. As one of over 80 speakers I’ll be sharing some of my knowledge about affiliate marketing on the mobile internet. The session will be open to full-conference-pass holders only but I’d be happy to meet you around the exhibit all before or after the session.

In numbers of booths and by its sheer size OMD beats all related fairs I’ve been to anywhere. Somebody said it was much larger than ad:tech New York which is true. The exhibit halls are seriously huge. But it’s also very crowded because the fair is quite untargeted. Admission to the exhibit halls and some presentations is free which also attracted a lot of semi-professionals. I even saw Toni Schumacher (the goal keeper of Germany’s national soccer team back in the 80s) on the floor.

Again, the list of exhibitors was impressive. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace etc., they were all there. However, somehow OMD didn’t seem to be my thing. The bottom line is that this whole event is pretty much about CPM advertising. There were all these media companies trying to sell advertising on their sites and also way too many agencies that are just looking for your search marketing or branding budget.

I don’t have a background in offline advertising and started doing online marketing with a performance-based mindset right from the beginning. The world of CPM is just not my thing and I think it will never be. In the world of CPM you have to play the corporate game including wearing a suit so that dumb clients buy some ads on your shitty inventory of sites. I had a blast at Affiliate Summit because it was about people doing business with other people. At OMD it was just about companies doing business with other companies.

If you’re an advertiser and want to generate a lot of volume at whatever cost, OMD is the place to find media companies and agencies who are competing to get your money. As an affiliate marketer whether you’re a merchant, publisher or network, I don’t think the outcome is that great. I was looking for merchants or technical solution providers but saw very few of them.

Internet Explorer

The current version 7 of IE blocks all third-party cookies by default. That means that pages loaded via frames cannot drop cookies at all if their domains are not equipped with a proper P3P policy. Many advertisers haven’t taken care of that, so all the iFrame affiliates will have more and more difficulties.

Internet Explorer 8 is going to introduce a private browsing mode. Cookies are not rejected right away but are treated as session cookies and deleted when the user closes the browser window. Some people refer to it as the “porn mode” but it was originally designed for the use of the internet on somebody else’s machine. Another new feature is giving users the ability to delete all cookies except those of bookmarked websites.

Mozilla Firefox

The current Firefox does not block third-party cookies. But it’s very easy to tell the browser to delete all cookies on closure. And a lot of people actually do this. Also, there are many plugins that filter out banners and cookies today already. The funny thing is that sometimes these impressions are still counted by the delivering ad networks even though nothing is being displayed.

Google Chrome

This sucker is quite ironic. It allows users to switch to a “stealth” mode making it difficult for ad networks to re-target ads and track conversions. However, the browser software itself collects data and passes it back to Google. As a result Chrome only allows Google ads to work, the other ad networks can be blocked. In my mind Chrome is the biggest spyware ever, nicely packaged I have to admit. I hope they’ll get sued over this.

Solution for Online Advertising Networks

For many years the effect of rejected/deleted cookies has been unkown. Now we finally have a profound data basis. AffiliateFuture, an affiliate network based in the UK, observed a 7% increase in tracked conversions after they introduced flash cookies. I think with the introduction of new browser generations the effect will be much higher.

Online advertising networks can’t rely on traditional browser cookies alone anymore. They must also incorporate technologies such as finger-print tracking and the use of flash cookies. Not one of these methods alone will work. They have to be used simultaneously.

Mobile Tracking

A lot of browsers on mobile phones do not support cookies, Javascript and Flash. So none of these methods can be used to track well on the mobile internet. That’s why for example Google’s conversion tracking is useless for mobile ad campaigns. The way to go on mobile is server tracking on the side of the advertiser and batch imports to the ad network.

Installation

I can only speak for my Windows Vista machine. You download a small executable file which then loads more data from the internet. What I didn’t like is that the damn thing attempts to install an autostart routine on your computer. Thanks to Spybot that didn’t happen to me. However, it managed to place an icon on the desktop and the taskbar without asking me. Looks like Google are using double standards to push their own product.

Rendering

Even though it uses a different browser engine the appearance of all sites I’ve checked so far hasn’t changed. I also have the impression that pages are rendered and displayed even faster than on my Firefox 3. JavaScript works fine and Flash objects played without any problem. But Java applets didn’t load. I’m told to install a plugin. Seriously, most people would give the browser a miss here.

Plugins

Speaking of plugins, I can’t find how to install them. Apparently they’re not part of the beta release yet. I’m interested to find out whether we will be able to use our beloved XUL-based Firefox plugins.

User Experience

It’s modern and minimalistic, something that’s generally good. However, Chrome got rid of the traditional “File, Edit …” menus and offers very few buttons. There isn’t even a print button. I don’t have a problem using the good old Ctrl+P but I think a lot of people will struggle here. Conservative users will also have problems creating and accessing bookmarks.

Conclusion

The current version is nice for geeks to play with but nothing for the majority of Google’s user base. Firefox still rules.

After I arrived I went straight to the buy.at pre-summit party. Thanks to Laura for the invitation. The GeekCast.fm people were trying to record a podcast in Sam Harrelson’s room after the party. But we were making too much noise I guess. The hotel security showed up a couple of times and ultimately threatened Sam to kick him out of his room. Anyways, I had a good time. Thanks for the beer and the whisky.

Sunday started with breakfast with Jeannine Crooks of Digital Instructor. Then I attended John Hasson’s session on pay-per-click marketing and Sam Harrelson’s session on affiliate marketing through social media. Both were great and I definitely want to see them both speaking again. Then I had dinner with Carsten Cumbrowski and Alexander Raab, a new affiliate marketer who came all the way from Germany to get educated here. The day ended with the ShareASale “Under The Stars” party. The live band was awesome.

I might post a little bit more when I get back. Right now I’m just busy. You can see a couple of pictures on Shawn Collins’ site and read a more detailed review on TrishaLyn’s blog.

However, I decided to remove Google Analytics from all my sites step-by-step. Why? Google won’t delete your websites’ data if you unsubscribe from Google Analytics. I hate data being collected and stored outside my sphere of influence. Using Google Analytics is like forwarding your server log files to your competition. I’d like to be in control of everything, especially when it comes to sensitive data.

As a Google Analytics alternative I’m using Piwik, an open-source web analytics package. It’s a free PHP/MySQL application that runs on standard LAMP servers. The front end consists of a fancy Ajax interface. The software also offers an API so that you can export data in a customized manner or put live statistics on your website. One Piwik installation can collect data for unlimited websites too. Seriously, it looks like Piwik is the way to go.

Saturday

• arrival at Logan airport in the afternoon
• water taxi to Seaport Hotel, check-in, shower
• 9:00pm: buy.at pre-summit party

Sunday

• 9:00am: Join me for breakfast!
• conference registration
• 12:00pm: Which PPC Engines Work And How? (John Hasson)
• 1:30pm: Leveraging Social Media (Sam Harrelson)
• 3:00pm – 6:00pm: networking at the Affiliate Meet Market and elsewhere
• some party or networking event

Monday

• 8:00am: Join me for breakfast!
• 9:00am: Opening Remarks & Keynote (Jim Kukral, Cory Booker, Blue Man Group)
• 12:00pm: Join me for lunch!
• 3:00pm: Landing Page Testing to Attract Super Affiliates (Tim Ash)
• 4:30pm: PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know (Amit Mehta)
• 6:00pm: Great Affiliate Road Rally
• 8:00pm: WebmasterRadio.fm Affiliate Bash

Tuesday

• 8:00am: Join me for breakfast!
• 9:00am: my “Ask The Experts” session about the mobile internet
• 11:00am: Web 2.0 for Affiliates
• 12:00pm: Join me for lunch!
• 5:00pm: Un-Keynote & Closing Cocktail
• some party, probably off-venue

On Wednesday I’m going to wake up late, pack and leave for New York City. I might also stay in Boston for another night and do some sightseeing. Let me know if you want to join me.

What I don’t like about CJ’s payment policy is that they pay slowly. Many affiliates receive their payouts not before 20 days after the end of the month. Professional affiliates are usually liquid enough to cover that period. But beginners in affiliate marketing should join other networks perhaps.

A while back Google changed their editorial guidelines and introduced special rules for the promotion of mobile content such as ringtones, mobile games and mobile applications. Prime targets of the new rules are promoters of subscription services. Under the new guidelines Google requires them to display the price and the billing interval prominently on the page where the user enters personal information (such as a phone number or an email address). In addition to that, the page needs to be equipped with a checkbox that the user has to activate.

After the introduction of these new guidelines some advertisers and affiliates got slapped. However, I think many of the bad apples haven’t been found yet. That’s why Google simply switched the burden of proof. It’s not the Google employees that need to scan their AdWords system for active phony offers. Now any Google ads and keywords promoting mobile content need to be reviewed and confirmed by Google to be running.

That’s sort of how they handle ads for pharmaceuticals. The difference is that pharmacies can submit an ID and they’re exempt. For mobile content advertisers every single keyword, ad and landing page has to be approved individually. I’m sure Google are working on an algorithm to automate this. But for now I would say it’s a manual process.

Google’s main concern is the user experience. Trust translates into traffic and yields AdWords revenue. It seems they prefer not to accept money from advertisers that run rip-off campaigns in order to secure the core of their business: trust.

Google is following a long-term strategy and can live without the ringtone industry very well. On the other hand, most mobile content advertisers are after short-term profit and depend highly on AdWords for instant traffic. I think we’re starting to see how Google is using its power to take down a whole industry.

Summer has finally returned to Berlin. We’ve got lots of sun with over 30°C. Time for days in the park or by the lake and evenings in beer gardens or with a barbecue.

One can’t sue somebody for stealing an idea. That’s not really protected unless it’s a trade secret. That’s why Facebook tries do sue the German portal over copyright infringement for using a similar “look, feel, features and services.” Now the California Supreme Court needs to decide about that. You can read the full story at Techcrunch.

I hope Facebook wins because I’ve never been a great fan of studiVZ. It hardly offers any features such as AJAX effects, RSS feeds, external applications and so on. Unfortunately most studiVZ users don’t even know that they’re using a sorry copy of Facebook. And by the way, studiVZ is hardly making any money because they haven’t figured out how to monetize their crappy community traffic through ads. The original founders sold the business at the right time.

Languages

First of all, the publisher interface has become multi-lingual. It’s now available not only in German but also in English, French, Spanish and Dutch.

RSS Feed for Payout Changes

Affilinet finally offers an RSS feed for payout changes. It’s a personalized URL that can be used with RSS readers without having to be logged on to Affilinet.

Web Services

Just like zanox, Affilinet is trying to open up and give publishers more access through the use of APIs. Publishers can now access their reports (including sub IDs) and also download product data including tracking links.

The feature also suggests related websites and keywords. Very interesting, not only for search marketers. This is another indicator for me that Google’s search algorithm will put more and more emphasis on data from the Google Toolbar and less on on-site factors and incoming links.

Put Money Aside

Any illness or accident will cost you time and money. You’re not able to work fully and you will need to reserve time for doctor appointments and such. Put some money from your regular income aside into a separate “emergency fund” that you touch when it’s needed. This gives you more security and reduces the worries while you’re handicapped.

Health Insurace

You need to get a very good private health insurance. It will definitely pay off in the long run because it gives you faster and better treatment. Doctors will make appointments available on very short notice and state-of-the art techniques and medication will be applied. Make sure that your insurance plan covers a daily allowance close to what you’re making when you work. Don’t be stingy when it comes to your health.

Accident Insurance

Pretty much the same: get a good one! In case you experience any permanent damages such as losing a hand, you want to get paid well. Also make sure you get a daily allowance that enables you to continue your current lifestyle.

Disability Insurance

It is possible that an illness or accident leaves you in a situation where you will never be able to work in your beloved profession again. Sometimes it can be as bad as not being able to work at all anymore. For both cases you want to have a good disability insurance that pays you a monthly allowance as a replacement for your old income.

Hospital Equipment

If you have an accident and need to spend time in a hospital you will need some things from home. Make sure you have a small bag with toiletries, underwear and some other basic equipment prepared so that it can be taken straight to the hospital.

You will also want to have your laptop computer with you. But in order to use it fully, get a wireless internet access contract from your mobile phone carrier. They don’t cost that much anymore. And have someone bring you your DVDs from home for entertainment.

Business Continuation

If you are a sole proprietor and nobody else has access to your stuff, your business would go down the hill. You need to find a co-worker, a good friend or a peer in your industry that you can trust 100%. He or she will be able to keep your business running when you become unavailable. These people need your logins and access to your bank accounts etc.. So you need to prepare powers of attorney for them and put your logins and stuff in a secret folder or a USB stick that you hide somewhere and encrypt with a password.

Here is an excerpt from the agenda which is subject to change:

Ask the Experts will be an opportunity for merchants, networks and affiliates to ask questions about various specialties and issues. Hand picked experts will handle topics in their specialty, and conduct chats, answer questions and share opinions during this networking and education session:

• Content Driven SEO – Byron White, President, LifeTips.com
• Email Marketing – William Waggoner, Vice President, AAW Marketing, LLC
• Google Radio and Print Ads – Holly Preuss, Principal, Granular Solutions
• Growing a Blog – Zac Johnson, President / CEO, MoneyReign Inc.
• Making the Most of Your Leads – Christian Habermann, Co-Founder, Consumer United
• Mobile Internet – Peter Glaeser, Online Entrepreneur, AffiliateTracking.de
• Online Video – Craig Gordon, President, WebPeople
• Working with Multiple Affiliate Networks – Brian Littleton, President / CEO, ShareASale.com

If you plan on going to the Boston conference, the session is on Tuesday, August 12, 2008, at 9am in the main conference room. I will be staying at the venue hotel from Saturday to Wednesday, so please get in touch with me while you’re there.

So if you’re an affiliate, don’t send traffic to landing pages with any type of distraction. Whether it be phone numbers, email addresses, links to other sites, or ads, they all kill your conversion. These advertisers either try to rip you off or they have no clue about online marketing. In any case, you lose! Just some random thoughts before leaving for the weekend …

Affiliate marketers can use it to find hot trends, promising niches, but also diminishing markets. Let me show you some examples (all data for the United Kingdom):

“presents” and “gifts”:

It’s no surprise that people look for these terms in December.

Facebook vs. MySpace:

Facebook is extremely hot in the UK at the minute whereas MySpace is becoming old.

The fall of “ringtones”:

Mobile content is not nearly as popular as it used to be.

So if you’re thinking about a new project, do your research on Google Trends. I’m not saying that you can’t be successful in declining markets. However, if you want to create something really big, you need to create something that people are interested in.

Today I’m going to describe how to download pages and/or complete sites onto your linux server or desktop computer. wget is the Linux command you’re looking for and here is how to use it:

Downloading a single file (without linked elements such as images):
wget http://www.google.com

Downloading a complete page (including linked elements such as images):
wget -p http://www.google.com

Downloading multiple complete pages (up to 7 levels):
wget -rkpl 7 http://www.google.com

Downloading (mirroring) a whole site (up to 10 levels):
wget -m 10 http://www.google.com

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

1. We download the WordPress source code:
unlink source_en.zip
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
mv latest.zip source_en.zip

2. We run backups of the old system, extract the new version and restore the old sitemap.
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
cp -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
unzip source_en.zip -d /srv/www/htdocs/$domain
cp /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old/sitemap.xml /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress
done

You also want to keep your plugins updated. You will need to collect the sources from various sites on the internet and put the extracted versions in a “plugins” folder on your server. With the following script you can deploy the contents of your plugins folder (which you keep up to date manually) to all of your WordPress installations:
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content/plugins
cp -r plugins /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content
done

Good luck and happy blogging.

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

Backup directories

You create the following directories:

• /root/backup/scripts
• /root/backup/files

Hourly backup script

Create /root/backup/scripts/1h.sh with the following contents and make it executable:
tar -czf /root/backup/files/partial_`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M`.tar.gz `find /etc /home /srv /var -type f -mmin -60` 2> /dev/null
find /root/backup/files -name 'partial*' -mtime +7 -exec unlink '{}' \;
This creates backups of files that were changed in the past 60 minutes. Also it deletes those hourly backups that are older than 7 days.

Daily backup script

Create /root/backup/scripts/1d.sh with the following contents and make it executable:
rm /root/backup/files/complete*
tar -czf /root/backup/files/complete.tar.gz /etc/ /home/ /srv/ /var/ 2> /dev/null
lftp ftp://#username#:#password#@#host# -e "put /root/backup/files/complete.tar.gz; quit"

This creates a full daily backup of the important files of your server. That complete backup is then copied to an external FTP server. That way you can access your backup even if the whole machine becomes inaccessible. You may need to install the lftp program if it’s not on your machine by default.

You don’t need to create separate MySQL dumps. The MySQL data are stored in the /var structure, in my case under /var/lib/mysql/#database#.

The service is going to be free. The underlying purpose of Google Ad Manager is the further spread of AdSense on publisher sites. Just like Google Analytics is supposed to help AdWords clients optimizing their campaigns, Ad Manager is supposed to help AdSense clients to deliver more ads and collect more information about your site.

It turned out that the MySQL table containing the posts crashed. The MySQL log told me that by post table “is marked as crashed and should be repaired”. Great! But a little bit of research solved the problem. You need to go to the corresponding MySQL database directory, for example /var/lib/mysql/wordpress, and execute the following commands as root:

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
myisamchk -r wp_posts.MYI
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Problem solved within a few seconds. If that hadn’t worked I would have used my backups that are created hourly. Let me know if I should write something about backup strategies for standard root servers too.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now because I hate being dependent on WLAN hotspots. First of all, you have to know where exactly you will be going and how you get an internet connection there before you leave. Locating WLAN hotspots while being offline can be a challenge.

Secondly, even though I’m paying them enough fees already, airports or hotels usually require you to pay extra for a lousy internet connection. And then it takes you ages to get going there because you will have to follow an order process first. Nope, been there, done that, got rid of it.

For 25 euros flat fee per month you can get real UMTS mobile internet access with BASE or E-Plus in Germany. It’s a 24-month contract but who cares. You can’t beat that price. I’ve been thinking about going with Vodafone because their coverage is a lot better in rural areas. But they were a lot more expensive. So BASE is it.

The Huawei E800 card works just fine with my Vista laptop. When you insert the card the computer also recognizes it as a CD-ROM drive. So there is no separate CD, the software is on the card itself. I’d never seen this before. Anyways, after two minutes of driver and software installation I was ready to go online. I have no clue if this card and the software work with Linux. But I really doubt it.

So, if you’re in an urban area in Germany and want to mobilize your office, feel free to click on the affiliate link below and get it yourself

Das Erzeugen von Cookies ist ausschließlich dann erlaubt, wenn ein Werbemittel eingesetzt wird, dieses sichtbar ist und der Erzeugung des Cookies ein bewusstes Anklicken durch einen Nutzer vorausgeht. Grundsätzlich ist Cookie-Dropping sowie das parallele Aufrufen der easyCredit-Seite ohne den Einsatz eines Werbemittels verboten.

Zum Mitschreiben: Cookies nur bei absichtlichen Clicks, also nicht bei PopUp, iFrame, Layer usw.

Hier noch einmal explizit:

Generell ist den Partnern untersagt iFrames, Pop-ups, Pop-under und Layer einzusetzen, die ein easyCredit-Werbemittel oder den easyCredit-Internetshop laden und ein Cookie beim Nutzer ohne dessen Mitwirkung setzen.

Untersagt ist für den Partner die unsichtbare Einbindung des Arcor- Internetshops, um ein Cookie beim Nutzer zu erzeugen. Generell ist Arcor-Partnern untersagt, iFrames, Pop-ups, Pop-under und Layer einzusetzen, die ein Arcor-Werbemittel oder den Arcor-Internetshop laden und ein Arcor-Cookie beim Nutzer ohne dessen Mitwirkung setzen. Postviewtracking ist untersagt, soweit von Arcor keine ausdrückliche schriftliche Zustimmung zum Einsatz dieser Methode erteilt worden ist. Sollte eine schriftliche Zustimmung von Arcor vorliegen, gilt, dass für die Postviewauslieferung maximal ein Cookie gesetzt werden darf.

Arcor will also die Konvertierung steigern indem die Qualität der Klicks verbessert wird. Cookie-Spammer die mit Popups, Layern und unsichtbaren iFrames arbeiten sind somit unerwünscht.

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.