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Now that I have your attention, Overstock may terminate its California affiliates tomorrow. The State Legislature is once again considering a bill that would make the Affiliate Nexus Tax law in California. If you are not familiar with this legislation, it defines affiliates as salespeople in order to establish nexus (the legal word for presence in the state) to out of state retailers (namely Amazon and Overstock).

We’ve been through this before. It started out as AB178 a couple of years ago. Kerri Pollard and I went to Sacramento to testify before the Budget and Finance sub-committee. As my cab pulled up at the State Capitol, I received an e-mail that the bill was pulled by its sponsor. It turns out that there weren’t enough votes to get it out of even the sub-committee.

Now its here… again. Last year it was passed under the cover of darkness and the Governor vetoed it. Overstock terminated us last year as part of the process. Only after the Governor vetoed the bill and issued a statement that he would not allow the Affiliate Nexus Tax to become law did Overstock reinstate all of us. Fortunately, CJ’s policies give us all a week before the termination takes effect so we would have time for the Governor to use his veto stamp (can’t you just picture it in slow motion… the stamp dropping onto parchment on the Governator’s desk…. cigar in his mouth (yes, it would be in the tent outside the Capitol)).

If you are a California publisher in the Overstock program, contact your state senator… NOW. Forward Overstock’s letter and explain how AB1625 (the current form of the Affiliate Nexus Tax) will hurt small businesses in your senator’s district. If you need more information or drafts of similar letters, take a look at the Performance Marketing Association’s website.

Also, there was a good op-ed piece by Loren Bendele in today’s LA Business Journal.

If you didn’t get Overstock’s letter, here it is. Remember not to beat up Overstock for this. This is a bad law that will hurt California’s small businesses and will not generate any revenue.

OVERSTOCK.COM, INC.
6350 SOUTH 3000 EAST
SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84121
PHONE: (801) 947-3100
FACSIMILE: (801) 947-3144

August 30, 2010

Dear Cashbaq:

Overstock.com values your advertising efforts, and hopes to be in a position to continue our business connection for years to come. However, as we notified you in February, there is a measure under consideration in California, likely to be voted on tomorrow, which, if it passes, will likely result in the termination of our business connection. We are urging you to contact your Senator in the California Legislature immediately to oppose the affiliate nexus tax.

By tomorrow the California Senate will have to consider the new tax, which appeared in the Assembly’s final budget proposal as AB 1625 (Section 1), or it will die for this year. In order to pass, AB 1625 needs a 2/3 majority vote. Its chances of passage are unclear; consequently, your efforts in opposition will be highly effective.

Last year the Governor vetoed a similar measure, and we are told that the Governor has not altered his position on this new tax; however, despite this, we are concerned about last minute political compromises.

You will find information on how to contact your State Senator at this location on the Performance Marketing Association’s website.

Please waste no time in contacting your Senator today to oppose the affiliate nexus tax.

Respectfully,

Jonathan E. Johnson III
President Overstock.com, Inc.

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Overstock to Terminate California Affiliates Again Tomorrow

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Wave, which was once touted as the email and social media killer by Google, has been phased out by the search giant. It will still be around, hovering on the web with its diehard users, but Google plans to let it die on the vine.

Somehow the billion-dollar bully of the Internet wasn’t able to put together a social networking success. Despite its commitment to the promotion and development of Wave, the product was always met by a collective shrug by the public. Google should be worried because its Buzz product is getting a somewhat similar reaction right now; when it’s not clogging up the GMail inboxes of curious onlookers that is.

So why was Wave, which allowed real-time email threads, playbacks and drag-and-drop sharing, such a big failure? It had the features that users were interested in, but despite coming out as social networking fervor was picking up steam, it never got any traction.

One of the biggest reasons was the exclusivity that Google used to first roll it out. Since Wave was first opened by invitation only, the initial excitement involved with getting an account was soon eclipsed by the simple fact that none of your friends were there to talk to.

And that type of exclusivity is a sign that Google still really doesn’t understand what drives social media.

For many, Google Wave was an empty room that no one had the patience to fill up. Why mess with waiting around and yelling your name into the darkness on Wave, despite its cool features, when you go log on to Facebook and talk with everyone you knew, share pictures, videos, links and — probably an overlooked key — ease of use.

Sure, when you signed up for Wave, you were given invitations to email to your friends. But if you were tepid and awkward about using the site, they would be too. Telling someone “Hey, let’s try Wave and see if we can figure it out” is a lot different than saying, “Dude, you need to get on Facebook so we can chat.” While such an invitation rollout strategy worked for Gmail it crashed for Wave.

Wave was innovative and slick, but in the end it was clunky and not-intuitive, which put it at a disadvantage when compared to Twitter, Facebook and other sites.

For its part, Google is doing what innovative companies should do: kill bad products and move on. According to TechCrunch, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said the company has a try, fail and keep creating mentality.

Wave may have been too ahead of its time, but most of all it was just too much of a closed system to matter to the public at large. The products Google has rolled out that have worked have been exceptional – Docs, GMail, Google Talk not to mention search. So for that, we should give Google some credit, they are smart enough to move on.

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Google Wave, We Hardly Knew You

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The environmental ramifications of the oil spill off the Gulf Coast should be everyone’s primary concern, of course, but there’s another kind of disaster marketers should analyze: the branding disaster associated with the oil spill.

Perhaps the crowning irony is that BP (British Petroleum) famously launched a marketing campaign entitled “BP: Beyond Petroleum” in 2000 and has stuck with it for a decade, touting very publicly its commitment to being green. OUCH.

Prior to the oil spill, reports Brandweek, BP had been the number one brand in the gasoline category on the Customer Engagement Loyalty Index, a respected measurement of brand popularity put out by research firm Brand Keys. But, says Brandweek, “in polls with consumers after the spill, BP dropped to dead last in the category, behind even Exxon.” Exxon, as we all know, has been dogged by the Exxon Valdez oil spill for umpteen years. The president of Brand Keys, Robert Passikoff, believes:

“The change [public] in sentiment will harm BP’s bottom line. Thirty percent of consumers, he said, will go out of their way not to buy from BP now. He attributes some of the avoidance to the brand’s positioning.”

As bad as BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” looks now, equally disastrous was the company’s sluggish and, some say, insensitive use of online communications, particularly social media, to blunt the crisis.

Lisa Merriam of brand strategy firm Merriam Associates thinks BP hurt itself by responding too slowly. She told Marketing Daily,

“They put all this emphasis on ‘human energy,’ and where are the humans now? It took them seven days to get out a Twitter response, and it’s so corporate and robotic. If you’re going to brag about how honest and open and responsive you are, you have to do that – would it have killed them to run a Twitter post that said something like, ‘Our hearts go out to the friends and families of those lost in the accident,’ or ‘We are working around the clock to contain the damage’?”

It took ten days after the oil rig blew up before BP had time to deal with the social ramifications and use, Facebook and Twitter for updates. But the Facebook page is not from BP alone – the page is sponsored by “Deepwater Horizon Response,” a joint effort by BP, the rig owner, and U.S. agencies involved in the operation.

In fact, it is this “unified command” that has created a decent webpage and manages the social media. BP’s identity is notably absent from the home page of the site. Deepwater Horizon Response is also posting videos to YouTube and slide shows to Flickr. And they are now encouraging comments and feedback, sometimes even asking for ideas from the public. Some of the Facebook comments are blunt, to put it mildly.

Stacey Knott, who manages the online operations for Deepwater Horizon Response, tells Adam Hochberg of Poynter Online, “Being able to have an open dialogue is social media at its best. … I want people to know there’s a real person here who’s trying to give them information.” Knott says the oil spill “may be the first attempt to develop a coordinated ‘one stop’ interactive effort during an ongoing disaster.

What can we, as online marketers, learn from BP’s double disaster?

For one thing, it would have made a lot of sense to use social media much more effectively and proactively, both to get out in front of the traditional media and, as Merriam pointed out, to be a little more human in responding. Which is not to say that responding to the disaster itself shouldn’t be top priority but BP is large enough of a corporation to have internal elements whose focus is strictly engagement. Those should have been put into play via social media much sooner. For another, BP could have opened the lines of communication early, and maybe even have tried to turn a problem into an opportunity by showing the world that it cared more about people than profits, and more about the environment than oil.

In short, BP could have proven it truly was “Beyond Petroleum.”

But they didn’t do any of that, and they will now have to live with the consequences of not just an environmental disaster, but a marketing disaster as well.

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As reported in ReveNews, a privacy bill was released in draft form on Tuesday with the intention of getting comments on the draft and then introducing formal legislation in about a month.

According to The New York Times:

The proposed bill would expand what information should be considered confidential. It would require companies to post clear and understandable privacy notices when they collected information. Such information could range from health or financial data to any unique identifier, including a customer identification number, a user’s race or sexual orientation, the user’s precise location or any preference profile the user has filled out. It could also include an Internet Protocol address…

Significantly, the bill also requires companies to advise consumers even when they are collecting any of that information off line, which could include data houses and direct marketers.

Reaction to the draft legislation was fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal reports that the legislation was “drawing criticism from both Internet and advertising industries, which are leery of regulation, and consumer privacy advocates, who say the bill does far too little to protect consumers.”

Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation told CNET, “By mandating a hodge-podge of restrictive regulatory defaults, policymakers could unintentionally devastate the ‘free’ Internet as we know it.” But Michelle De Mooy of the group Consumer Action said “We don’t think it effectively protects consumer information online.” Susan Grant of the Consumer Federation of America added, “It carves out a huge loophole for behavioral advertising. It prevents states from enacting and enforcing stronger privacy legislation.”

Mike Zaneis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau told The New York Times that some of the definitions in the legislation were “overly broad.” He said including an IP address would be a significant “change to existing laws here in the U.S. and would potentially have widespread implications.”

In short, no one seems happy with the content of the bill. Even groups on opposite sides of the issue agree that the potential legislation stinks. Given that the draft legislation was released by both Democrat and Republican Congressmen, the blame can’t be heaped on one party. Instead, it appears that once again, Washington may be trying to legislate business practices without considering the voices of either industry or consumers.

Stay tuned to see if this legislation moves forward in its current form, or if the uproar it has created is heard on Capitol Hill. It would be nice to think legislators would listen for a change and come up with something that makes sense and serves the needs of everyone.

Continued here:
Reaction to Privacy Bill Fast and Furious

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According to AdExchanger.com Representatives Rick Boucher, Democrat from Virginia and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and Cliff Sterns, a Republican from Florida and ranking member of the Subcommittee, released a ” discussion draft of legislation to assure the privacy of information about individuals both on the Internet and offline”.

The release from Rep. Boucher’s site can be found here. Boucher said:

“Our goal is to encourage greater levels of electronic commerce by providing to Internet users the assurance that their experience online will be more secure.  That greater sense of privacy protection will be particularly important in encouraging the trend toward the cloud computing, Online advertising supports much of the commercial content, applications and services that are available on the Internet today without charge, and this legislation will not disrupt this well established and successful business model. It simply extends to consumers important baseline privacy protections.”

For a full version of the Bill is available here (PDF).

If passed the bill in its current format would have a major impact on the way ad networks handle their share of the $23 billion online advertising market. Particularly, consumers would need to grant permission for their data to be collected via third party cookies, according to the The Wall Street Journal, however:

“The ad company wouldn’t need to solicit permission to collect information about consumers if the targeted ad includes a link that explains which company was involved in making the ad appear, shows consumers what information is collected about them and gives them the chance to opt out.”

The bill would impact how companies cookie consumers through first-party cookies, as well as how effect how behavioral data is used. It also includes special restrictions for the collection of sensitive information including:

• financial information
• medical history
• drivers’ license
• Social Security cards
• information about children or adolescents.

Enforcement would fall upon the Federal Trade Commission which be granted oversight authority under the legislation.

While we endorse privacy efforts here at ReveNews, the scope of the bill is troublesome since it is written in manner which doesn’t seem to comprehend exactly how the majority of transactions online work. Obviously, however, the “Privacy Matters” campaign by the Interactive Advertising Bureau are simply not enough of a step when it comes to industry self-regulation.

Continued here:
Breaking News: New Legislature on Online Behavioral Targeting Proposed

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As the mobile marketing arena heats up, it only makes sense that affiliate networks become immersed in mobile. A company called OfferMobi is using this week’s ad:tech conference in San Francisco to launch what it claims is the “first U.S.-based affiliate network focused on the mobile web.”

While initial details are sketchy and the company’s website is bare bones, OfferMobi says it is launching with “over 50 U.S. and international offers” and that its network is “completely risk-free” to advertisers because of a model based entirely on CPA (Cost Per Action). The company is working in partnership with Ring Revenue to also provide targeted pay per call services for advertisers who don’t have a call center solution.

Part of OfferMobi’s pitch is providing education and assistance to both advertisers and affiliates. The company recognizes it is forging new ground as “the next generation in performance marketing,” so it provides free mobile tools, such as “3Search” and “Mobile Preview,” to help its users. OfferMobi makes mobile-ready landing pages available to advertisers that are compatible with the majority of mobile phones and devices.

OfferMobi says it can help advertisers build their own custom mobile landing pages and execute creative.

One looming question about OfferMobi’s entry into the marketplace is how other affiliate networks will react. A quick scan of the major affiliate networks’ websites shows little if any mention of mobile capabilities. Nonetheless, mobile is certainly on the minds of some of the leading players.

 Kerri Pollard of Commission Junction says that in 2010, “we expect opportunity in terms of social media and mobile.” With the smartphone market booming, Kerri says Commission Junction will “gain a heck of a lot more traction [in mobile] than in years past.”

 Jonathan Levine of LinkShare agrees his company is well-positioned to be a mobile leader because of parent company Rakuten, but he also says “the thing that nobody’s figured out yet, in the US, is the common wallet or payment system. Something we have figured out with Rakuten in Japan. …I think the company that figures out how to broker the common wallet hurdle is going to do very well on mobile.”

Larry Adams of the Google Affiliate Network thinks the increased sophistication of smartphones, particularly in their ability to browse websites, will help fuel adoption of mobile marketing. “I think with a lot more smartphones out there people will become more comfortable and start buying stuff on their phones,” says Adams. But he points out that until e-commerce sites have more mobile experiences, there won’t be a “huge opportunity” for affiliate marketing.

If the current lack of mobile-specific offerings by leading affiliate networks is any indication, it appears that OfferMobi has gained at least a short-term advantage in the mobile marketing space.

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Mobile Affiliate Network Launches at ad:tech

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As someone who cut his teeth on direct mail, and built a direct marketing agency around it, I get just a little emotional when I see what’s happening to the U.S. Postal Service.

In February 2010, a month with only 28 days, the Postal Service chalked up a net loss of more than $610 million. That’s nearly $22 million a day – more than the annual sales of most U.S. companies. The first five months of its fiscal year the Postal Service had a loss of $1.5 billion – an average of $300 million per month.

We’ve been hearing about the problems of the Postal Service for years. So what is the Postal Service doing about it? This dinosaur’s latest survival plan is to end Saturday mail delivery sometime next year. This move will save maybe $5 billion per year – almost insignificant given a projected deficit for the next decade of over $230 billion. That’s billion.

When I was running my direct marketing agency, I could have suffered the same fate. I watched the rise of this thing called the Internet. But instead of steadfastly remaining a direct mail agency, my staff and I reinvented ourselves into a direct marketing agency. We became experts in email, online advertising, online seminars, microsites, websites, and the like. We didn’t eliminate direct mail entirely, we just shuffled the media mix in keeping with the times. Direct mail agencies that didn’t know how to do that soon went out of business.

That’s what is so surprising, and heart-breaking, about the Postal Service. You see, they had the same opportunity every direct marketer had. And they had it even better – after all, they were in the regulatory and licensing business. Imagine if the Postal Service had been run by visionaries who were able to somehow harness the Internet… who could have figured out a way to make a business of authenticating digital signatures… who could somehow regulate junk email… who were able to create officially licensed websites for consumers and businesses… or some variations of those things.

Heck, even if the Postal Service had figured out how to compete with FedEx and UPS it would have been a victory. How is it that those guys could make such a good business out of package delivery? Isn’t that one of the lines of business of the Postal Service?

Instead of the kind of innovative leadership that would have positioned the Postal Service as the communications regulators of the future, the Postal Service is mired in the perception of the past. They deliver paper mail – and not always very efficiently. Now sure, I still like paper mail, but even I can see how it’s evolved and become a secondary medium. But not the Postal Service.

So here’s my point. There’s an important lesson for all of us in the year-after-painful-year deterioration of the Postal Service. It’s the same lesson Blockbuster is learning as it furiously fights to stave off bankruptcy, protecting an old retail business model while launching mobile movies in a last-ditch effort to compete with companies like Netflix and Redbox.

It’s this: You can do things as you’ve always done them, watch the world change around you, and be tossed onto the garbage heap of irrelevancy. OR you can look out into the future, embrace changing technologies, take a few risks now and then, and be a real leader – or at least keep running with the rest of the pack.

The Postal Service is the kind of sad case study we should all learn from.

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What Online Marketers Can Learn from the Postal Service

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A new study out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us how consumers get their news. No surprise: 92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms (television, newspapers, radio, the Internet) to get news on a typical day. But the real story, of course, is the impact of the Internet and the fundamental ways it is changing consumer behavior.

The Internet is now third in popularity for news, behind only local television and national television news. But here are some key findings that go a lot deeper:

• Most people use between two and five online news sources
• 65 percent say they do not have a single favorite website for news
• 33 percent of cell phone owners access news on their cell phones
• 37 percent of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
• 50 percent of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know
• More than 80 percent of online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• 70 percent of Americans think “the amount of news and information available from different sources today is overwhelming.”

What can online marketers learn from these statistics?

1.    It appears that the Internet has replaced traditional newspapers and news magazines, but it has also encouraged news-hopping, so to speak. If consumers are using multiple news sources rather than a single source, clearly no one media outlet has garnered their loyalty. Are consumers not getting an objective perspective from a single source? Or do they get different kinds of news from different sites? Maybe consumers are more discriminating than they’re often given credit for and they like a story to be validated by more than one source. Whatever the reason, it means online marketers shouldn’t commit all of their ad dollars to just one online news source.

2.    Consumers will likely rely more and more on their cell phones to get online information and news. As I wrote in a previous post, 2010 could become a banner year for mobile usage, so online marketers need to plan now to get their fair share of this marketplace.

3.    The old news paradigm seems to be crumbling. It used to be that authoritative figures delivered the news via traditional media channels. Newspaper reporters’ stories and columnists’ commentaries carried weight. Television anchors were respected. The news was the news.

The new news paradigm is very different. Professional journalists are being replaced with citizen journalists and bloggers. While amateur journalism may not always be a good thing, it does represent a much broader spectrum of observation and opinion. Media outlets like CNN encourage consumers to send in their video reports. Over a third of consumers are taking a participatory role in the news now, and that’s likely to increase. They’re sharing the news with friends and acquaintances, discussing it online, and not just accepting news at face value. For the most part, online marketers already recognize the consumers’ collaborative power. That’s why they are building in opportunities for social interaction and feedback into their marketing programs.

4.    It may not be surprising that the majority of news consumers are overwhelmed by information. Television channels have proliferated and the Internet has opened up more informational opportunities than any consumer could ever handle. But this may suggest another opportunity: What if an online marketer could help the consumer cut through the clutter? It’s already being done by organizations such as SmartBrief, a media company that hand-picks relevant news, summarizes it, and delivers it with links to the original stories in e-mail newsletters tailored to 25 different industries.

We all recognize that the Internet has fundamentally changed the manner in which people consume information. As marketers, we need to also recognize what each of us can do to help solve information overload – and to become such a vital resource that a consumer will choose the information we provide over someone else’s.

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4 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From How Consumers Get Their News

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AOL Inc. has sold its affiliate marketing business, Buy.at, for an undisclosed price to Digital Window Ltd., which runs AffiliateWindow and ShopWindow.  Digitial Window claims that the purchase of Buy.at will make them the largest “performance-based marketing” group in the UK, a place believed to be currently held by TradeDoubler.

AOL, which separated from Time Warner Inc. late last year, bought Buy.at in 2008 for a reported $150 million,  a price unconfirmed by the company. The plan was to integrate it with the ambitious Platform-A, its ad platform designed to cover every market and niche for its own properties and its ad network.  Platform-A has been renamed AOL Advertising.

If anyone has more news on the transaction, please let us know.

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The Winter Olympics kicked off just days ago in Vancouver, Canada. As always, the primary media coverage is traditional television, but there’s a new and essential spin this year – social media.

As Alexandra Samuel points out in her blog for Harvard Business Review,  the Winter Olympics is “a living social media experiment.” While social media was used during the Summer Games in Beijing, “this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime,” says Samuel.

Social media is having an impact that goes beyond the Olympics Games themselves. For example, the city of Vancouver became a hotbed of social media activity well before the games even started. Vancouver’s local media coverage of the Olympics has also changed dramatically, according to Samuel. Citizen journalists, she says, “have provided an alternate – and often critical – take on the Games.” Linda Solomon, publisher of the Vancouver Observer, an online news magazine that recruited over 150 contributors, tells Samuel, “It’s not about crafting a story anymore, which is an art that takes many years to master. It’s about telling what you see and think, something anybody can do. This levels the playing field.”

Another area that is depending heavily on social media is the “Cultural Olympiad” – an entire series of multi-disciplinary festivals running before, during, and after the Games. The Cultural Olympiad showcases Canadian and international music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and film.

In addition to making early use of Twitter and Facebook, the Cultural Olympiad launched Canada CODE, a giant digital project that, for a year before the Olympics, provided Canadians with an online platform for “connecting, creating and collaborating” with the people of the world to present “an ever-evolving portrait” of Canadians. The culmination of CODE is an invitation to enter the “Virtual Stadium” and upload a personal photo for a chance to be a virtual part of the Olympics Closing Ceremony.

The International Olympics Committee has had to deal with the impact of social media by establishing regulations for its use. The IOC allows athletes to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools as well as blogs, but requires that they limit any posts to personal experiences. “You can’t act as a journalist if you aren’t,” said Bob Condron, director of media services for the United States Olympic Committee. “You need to do things in a first person way.” Athletes are also forbidden to reference any sponsor or advertiser that is not an official Olympic partner. Condron told Wired, “These are going to be the Twitter Olympics.”

Whatever happens during the Olympics, it seems clear that social media has changed the ground rules. Says Samuel, “On the one hand, the Olympic narrative of global community seems like a natural fit for social media… On the other hand the complexity and business model behind the Games make the prospect of grassroots storytelling a huge challenge.”

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Winter Olympics a Test Case for Power of Social Media

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Apparently, the newspaper industry has finally had enough – or at least the New York Times has. Word came out on Wednesday that the New York Times would start charging for its online content.
The Times has tweaked its model from all-everything or all-free with a model that will only charge its most avid users. But that’s significant, given the fact that the media as a whole tends to follow the lead of the Times in how business is done.
For the past few years, the newspaper business has tried to stop its collective bleeding. Blaming everyone from unpaid bloggers to Google, much of the consternation stemmed from regret over not charging for access from the early days of the Web.
With the Times moving ahead and pulling the trigger, look for many other newspapers to follow suit. The media has argued that it wants to benefit financially from the giant traffic stream that Google brings to its sites, but that argument may be flawed.
While it’s true that readers are going to search engines as their first place for news, they might not be biting on the hook that newspaper web sites are offering. According to a new study, 44 percent of people who scan headlines on Google don’t click through to newspaper Web sites.
When the paywall slams down around the Web there’s going to be a much tighter atmosphere for the information that fuels aggregating sites and search engines. If The Huffington Post can’t excerpt the Times as often, how does that impact the value of HuffPost?
The year of the paywall will cause ripples across the Web and force users to answer the question of whether they are willing to pay for information just like they pay for apps and music.

Originally posted here:
2010: The Year The Paywall Comes Down

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In October I wrote a post about the fact that the majority of newspaper and magazine publishers were entertaining the idea of charging for online content. The biggest problem for all publishers of online content is finding a magic bullet, not yet identified, to get consumers to pay for access to that content. The latest reports by the New York Times, in what ironically are subscription required articles, indicate that 2010 may be the year of big change.

But what kind of change will it be? It seems less likely that it will be a year of paid content, and more likely to be a year of moving in a different technological direction.

Newspaper and magazine closings in 2009 continued to shrink the traditional print category. The double whammy for such publications has been the simultaneous loss of print subscribers and advertising revenue. Book publishers are starting to panic, too, as they saw the beginnings of a stronger movement to e-books, fueled by Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book readers.

That’s why it is likely that some kind of significant change for print publications will occur in 2010. They simply cannot survive current business conditions much longer.

Interestingly, magazines, newspapers and books are only representative of a larger media revolution that all of us have been living for quite some time. Look what digital media has done to the music business. First records and now CDs are becoming obsolete as digital downloads spread. We have become the iTunes generation.

Movies and television are not far behind. The entertainment industry is currently looking at ways to prevent itself from a similar digital death. Ben Weinberger’s recent Video Insider blog gives us a taste of things to come in 2010:

• Disney’s “Keychest” will enable consumers to “unlock” digital content across media formats
• Best Buy in partnership with CinemaNow will provide customers with the ability to download premium content and watch it on multiple screens
• Time Warner, Comcast, and other cable providers will offer “TV Everywhere” multi-platform access to their cable programming.

Will 2010 be the year of paid content – or will it be the year we see magazines and newspapers producing interactive digital editions? Magazines like Esquire and GQ already offer iPhone versions of their magazines. Esquire’s iPhone version, available next month for a $2.99 monthly subscription, offers scrollable articles and video.

Will 2010 be the year of the Apple tablet, rumored to be named “iSlate”? Essentially a touchscreen that’s standard page size, a tablet computer may offer print publications a new lease on life. Publication executives have supposedly met with Apple, and the result is that several magazines are creating tablet versions that allow readers to interact with articles, rearrange content, and access content unavailable in print versions. The tablet could provide a hybrid platform that brings together the best of computer and online technology. And publishers swoon to think that tablets can also provide data capture that makes ads measurable.

Whatever 2010 will bring for print publishers, it will be a year in which they will undoubtedly begin to reinvent themselves.

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What will 2010 Bring for Print Publishers?

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Ever since we launched real-time and streaming quotes on Google Finance last year, we’ve heard from users how vital that up-to-date information has been. Especially in today’s volatile financial environment, current information can be the difference between a seizing an opportunity and missing it. Today, we’ve taken a big step towards improving access to current financial information: streaming financial and market news on Google Finance.

Streaming keeps information fresh

Streaming real-time quotes eliminates the 15- and 20-minute delays often associated with pricing data. Streaming the quotes keeps information on the page up to date, without having to reload.

Now, by streaming news as well, you’ll see stories appear on Google Finance as they develop minute by minute, throughout the day. You can view news on the Google Finance homepage, or the dedicated news page. Updated news items will appear automatically in the News section. News will be streamed from 8am-5:30pm ET, 90 minutes before and after U.S. trading hours.

Up-to-date information across the site

As we deliver more information, we’ve worked to improve the way we display it. In the last few months, we’ve released a few other improvements to Google Finance designed to make financial information easier to access and more usable:

• As you navigate throughout Google Finance, your recent quotes are streamed live in the left-navigation bar, so you don’t need to keep checking the same tickers.
• On company pages, all stock prices, index and sector comparisons as well as the interactive chart are streamed during market hours.
• The new interactive Related companies page lets customize a table that compares companies along the dimensions you specify.

Financial information doesn’t exist in a vacuum. News can stimulate trades, and trades of one stock can have broad market effects. Figuring how to organize all of that information and make it useful is crucial — and that’s what we’re working on.

There is still a long way to go, so stay tuned for more updates.

Posted by Andre Lebedev, Software Engineer and Ayan Mandal, Product Manager

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If the Federal Trade Commission had the intention to spark off a wave of sometimes worried, sometimes angry and often indignant blog posts and forum chatter with their “Final Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”, they’ve certainly succeeded.

About a week ago, ReveNews contributor Andrew M. Baer, Esq, wrote “FTC Regulates Blogger, Viral Marketing Relationships: Analysis and compliance tips” stating why he’s not concerned about the FTC intentions.

The guides which come into force on 1st December, are aimed at addressing endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, with the intention of holding bloggers or other “word of mouth” marketers accountable, with the enforcement mechanism of a possible $11,000 fine.

As short-sighted and ambiguous as some bloggers have painted the guides to be, many bloggers’  objections have been equal in the fear, uncertainty, and doubt camp as they accuse their detractors. Many blogs painting worst-case scenarios and posting what-if scenarios with $11,000 fines for receiving cheap paperbacks as a freebie in the mail, writing a positive review and linking it to an Amazon affiliate link.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which comprises more than 375 leading media and technology companies is responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States and includes organizations like:
* AOL Advertising
* AT&T Internet Services
* BBC Worldwide
* Google Inc
* Microsoft Advertising
* Yahoo! Inc
* Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc
* Harvard Business Review
* CNN.com
* FOX Interactive Media
* Nokia Inc

and other technology/internet/news heavyweights in its membership roster. IAB has come out swinging off the ropes with IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg firing off an open letter to FTC chairman, Jon Leibowitz, published on the IAB website and the Huffington Post, expressing his disagreement with the guides on the basis that they are unconstitutional and should be retracted.

In case you’re wondering if the IAB is shooting from the hip, take note that the organization has attempted to start a dialogue with the FTC since March this year, with correspondence detailing(pdf) feedback on the proposed guides. The attempt to have the industry self-regulate appears to have failed, given that the FTC has expressed its intention to keep an eye and active hand in the industry.

In a FTC arranged media call on 14th October to address reporter’s inquiries on the guides, FTC’s Bureau Consumer Protection’s Associate Director for Advertising Practices, Mary Engle, stated:

Although the [Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)] contends the FTC’s Endorsement Guides are unconstitutional, the Guides apply only to marketing and they attempt to illustrate some of the factors relevant to distinguishing advertising from editorial content,” says Mary Engle, the FTC’s director of the division of advertising practices, in an email statement released today. “If particular communications do not in fact constitute advertising, as the IAB appears to be suggesting, then the Guides do not apply. Where the message is advertising, however, disseminators have an obligation to ensure it is not misleading. This includes, when it is not otherwise clear from the context, identifying when the endorser has been paid for the endorsement. Although IAB may disagree with the policy, nothing in this approach is unconstitutional,” .

From FTC’s Engle terse reply, it’s unlikely to halt the IAB’s attempt to rescind the FTC’s guides.

Even with the FTC contention that the primary targets are advertisers, rather than bloggers, have failed to assuage Rothenberg.

IAB’s Rothenberg contends that even with the FTC’s intention to go after advertisers, rather than bloggers, doesn’t mean that bloggers are off the hook. By it’s “social” nature, bloggers and their blogs are the advertising medium, hence they could still be looking at $11,000 fines.

How will this play out as the December 1st enforcement date draws near?

It’s unlikely that the FTC or IAB are going to back down at the moment, but the IAB’s Washington DC Public Policy office will be keeping very busy till then.

Continued here:
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I culled through the this years Inc 5000 Advertising and Marketing list to try to pick out companies primarily focused on performance marketing and broke them into 3 categories.  Here are the top Affiliates, Affiliate OPMs, and Affiliate / CPA networks in the Inc 5000 for 2009 based on Revenue Growth from 2005 to 2008.  If I missed any companies, I appologize, it’s not always easy to identify performance marketing companies by their descriptions on inc.com  and their websites.

Here is the list:

Affiliates in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Affiliate OPMs in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Affiliate Networks in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Excerpted from:
2009 Top Performance Marketing Companies in the Inc 5000

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