Cashing Out: Week of May 24th -31st 2009 in Online Marketing News

May 31, 2009 No comments

“Pay with Facebook” Sightings

Facebook has been working on modifying its terms and conditions to cover payments. This week TechCrunch claims to have seen a form of the coming payment system Facebook is rolling out in the app GroupCard. Micro-payments on Facebook should be a huge game changer both for applications in Facebook and may have an interesting impact on other providers like Paypal.

LinkShare Serves Up Bento Box

With a nod to its owner’s roots LinkShare has published a resource it calls Bento Box which provides a list of platform plug-ins and 3rd party tools that integrate with LinkShare’s Web Services.

Adify Releases Public API

Vertical ad network management company Adify released this week a public API allowing customers and third-party vendors to reach the 12,000 publishers the network has in its portfolio. The goal is to allow companies to deliver video, display, and rich media advertising options tailored to specific publisher verticals.

Ebook Platform Smashwords Dives into Affiliate Channel

Smashwords, an ebook platform and store for independent authors has launched an affiliate program. The program is inhouse, pays an 11% standard commission and allows authors to directly increase the commissions for their ebook to publishers they have a relationship with.

Imagini Gets into Affiliate DNA Visually

UK startup Imagini has launched a widget it calls VisualDNA that purports to discover people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. It then serves up relevant affiliate product recommendations based on the personality profile. As a baseline for its data Imagini draws from its personality test site Youniverse.

And Two Great Articles: Shawn Collins Takes on Forbes, and Brian Solis’ take on proposed FTC rules

…and although not actually a news piece we highly recommend this article by Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins as attempts to straighten the faulty logic of Forbes writer Lee Gomes (feel free to comment on Forbes the article directly here). Plus Brian Solis of PR 2.0 has written an excellent in depth post on the proposed FTC rules entitled “This is Not a Sponsored Post: Paid Conversations, Credibility & The FTC”. Enjoy.