Archive for May, 2006
Online Video Viewing Up, says comScore
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices, Web 2.0 Marketing Wednesday, 24 May 2006 16:55 No Comments
My stock portfolio convinces me regularly that I have a very limited ability to predict the future. But two fresh news stories suggest that I may have gotten at least one thing right when I talked about online video.
Consumption is up by a healthy 18 percent in the six months from October 2005 to March 2006, according to comScore. And � surprisingly, perhaps � the usage (though not the amount) is about evenly split between men and women.
Add to that statistic another, perhaps even more astounding: 3.7 billion streams were viewed, at an average of 100 minutes per month. (Though males, unsurprisingly, watch more at nearly two hours per month compared to females at one hour twenty minutes.)
Taking the smaller figure as discounting porn, even at an hour per month � with the growth of and low resistance to video ads � that’s equal to the average time spent on search.
As reported by Zachary Rodgers on ClickZ:
“But while certain demographic sets consume more video than others, the report’s biggest surprise is that people from all ages and walks of life are eating it up, according to Erin Hunter, comsCore’s EVP of media and entertainment.
‘There are skews by age, but there isn’t any group that’s not doing it,” she said. “It’s not just college kids. It’s also the older demographic, and clearly it’s males and females both. In terms of content, we see entertainment and sports and news all with pretty strong rates of viewership.’”
Interestingly, the market share percentages � though not the companies nor their order � for providing that video break down along lines similar to search. YouTube is at 43%, MySpace at 24%, Yahoo! At 9,58%, and MSN 9.21%, with Google trailing at 6.48%. (Source: Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews.)
Add to those facts another story that shows Napster’s music increase in sales at 104% and I begin to look downright psychic � which I definitely ain’t. Or so my broker tells me.
Partner Contextual Video Ads With Mobile Music Downloads
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Content Network Tuesday, 23 May 2006 16:13 No Comments
Google has announced their much-anticipated contextual video ad program. Ads will be displayed as static images, but clicking starts a video with fast-forward, pause, and volume controls. A separate click takes the viewer to the advertiser’s site.
Now’s a perfect time to jump on those video podcast sites and download the tools you need to turn your ads into eye-magnets. You can bid for play in the same way as usual (CPC or CPM) and geo-target locally, nationally, or internationally. So, brush up on the version of English the other country speaks, too.
When you think about content, consider that teens are more graphically and video oriented than adults and they represent between 12 and 15 million shoppers in the U.S. alone. (James Maguire has some excellent tips for designing your site to attract and appeal to teens, here at e-Commerce-guide.com.) The one thing above all else to remember is: keep it interesting. Teens bore easily.
And what’s one of the top things teens buy online? Music, of course. With a cell phone in the hands of nearly every teen, you have an opportunity to direct them to a merchant that allows users to download their favorite tunes. And they’re more willing to pay to download to a mobile phone, than any other service. At $2-3$ a pop for a mobile download, the dollars can add up fast.
Online retail spending is expected to rise to $211 billion in this year ($138 B, excluding travel), and a significant chunk of that will be in music sales. Download some money.
Click Fraud Enters the Big Time
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices Monday, 22 May 2006 17:33 2 Comments
A big botnet is on the loose.
Unlike the ultra-cool robots in science fiction movies, this piece of scumware is out to cheat you of hard earned cash. Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliate Programs posted a piece of the story reported (among other places) on Help Net Security.
“PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud �pay per click� systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).”
Even hackers have turned materialistic these days, and are willing to create payloads that don’t delete files or splash annoying messages, but artificially click ads. They click away, mindlessly making money out of thin ether. But like any non-productive activity, it doesn’t create anything of value � it simply steals from hardworking affiliates.
Fight back.
In our upcoming issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine, Yours Truly discusses the phenomenon and provides some resources and guidance on how to do just that.
Search Engines We Like, Sort Of, Some Days
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Search Network Friday, 19 May 2006 16:57 2 Comments
Activity among the major search engine companies is… well, active.
Yahoo! has redesigned the home page and added a nice feature to local search, by including phone numbers in results. Bill Gates is talking about integrating Internet search into the Windows operating system. (Which, given some of the new features in the upcoming Windows Vista release, Microsoft may well do.) And Google is… doing everything under the sun, as usual.
All this, and more, is part of each of The Big 3’s vow to � let’s be nice now � compete strongly.
Normally, I stay away from recommending one over the other. One major reason is that they all do a great job or a hideous job, depending on your goals.
As a user, Google often provides results I find useful in research. As an affiliate marketer they � let’s be nice again � fall a bit short of being ideal. The same could be said of MSN and Yahoo!. Usually. But today is unusual.
Search on “affiliate marketing” and Affiliate Classroom will come up first in the organic results on MSN and second on Yahoo! We like that. On Google, we fall down at the end of the third page. We, er, like that a lot less. (Of course, all those results could change tomorrow or an hour from now.)
Search on “learn affiliate marketing” and we come up #3 on Google and #2 on, drum roll please, Ask.com. We like that a lot. Ask.com’s CEO Jim Lanzone is promising to make Ask.com a lot better. If Affiliate Classroom’s ranking there is any indication, he’s on the right track as far as we’re concerned.
He’s not aiming to knock Google off the top of the hill (for which we salute his realism), but simply to be better for users (for which we applaud his idealism).
In the recent interview, he said:
“We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share.”
We could quarrel with his terminology, but the idea is sound. That’s not just idealism or realism, that’s good business strategy, since it involves a reachable goal using current resources.
Like a child’s swing, sometimes a modest push at the input side � applied at the right time, in the right way � leads to a large increase in output. Good luck with that, Mr. Lanzone. Sincerely. We’d definitely like to see search engine marketers have another viable alternative.
Nostalgia With Numbers, Internet Style
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices Thursday, 18 May 2006 19:00 No Comments
We recently reported that nearly 800 million persons now use the Internet. According to one recent report, that number may be 20% too low.
eMarketer states that:
“Internet access became available to one billion people worldwide, with approximately 845 million using it regularly.”
Not too many years ago people would say, in a tone of awe and disbelief, that there were one billion people in China. Many who said it were alive when the entire world population wasn’t much more than that.
A little more trivia. In 1906, a first class stamp cost two cents and women in Finland got the right to put in their two cents via the vote. Around the same time the first communication cables were being laid between San Francisco and Asia.
Now, what has all this to do with � to use another nostalgic expression � the price of tea in China? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Today, the Chinese have the largest, single-country, active Internet population (111 million) after the U.S. (175 million). With electronic banking and email, many people no longer bother with stamps at all, and the Finns are second in the number of hours per week they spend online. 195 million households around the world have broadband access, mostly via cable.
All those numbers mean this to affiliate marketers: more traffic and more income from more users in more places around the world.
Things definitely ain’t what they used to be.
