Make Money Online

As a North Carolina resident, I was disheartened to learn of our legislators’ decision to tax Internet affiliate marketing revenue. While the state may be an early adopter of such a practice, it does not bode well for the future. States are like dominoes – if one state finds a successful way to generate tax revenues, it’s only a matter of time for the others to fall in line.

From a practical perspective, it’s not hard to understand the current financial mess the states are in. The federal government has all but abandoned them. When businesses aren’t making money and consumers are keeping their cash instead of spending it, tax revenues dry up. It’s simple: States need to find new and creative ways to get money in their coffers. Never mind the fact that they may waste funds on questionable projects or allocate dollars for politically motivated reasons.

But here’s the problem: The Internet is not merely a sales channel – it has become the repository of our nation’s and the world’s information, and the engine of our nation’s and the world’s economy. As such, its value must be recognized as above and beyond something a state should be able to arbitrarily tax.

Harvard Business School Professors John Deighton and John Quelch, writing in AdAge, offer some startling statistics from a study they prepared with Hamilton Consultants for the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

• Roughly two percent of Americans are directly or indirectly employed in jobs that support the Internet. The dollar value of their wages is about $300 billion.
• The Internet directly pours about $175 billion into the U.S. economy – but it influences economic activity that creates an annual value of $444 billion.
• About 190 million people in the United States use the Internet an average of 68 hours per month. The value of this time, conservatively speaking, is about $680 billion.

Deighton and Quelch also discuss the Internet’s impact on job creation, telecommuting, and society through social networks and online communities. The implications go far beyond the economic impact of the Internet.bDeighton and Quelch conclude with this point:

“When regulators start trying to constrain the Internet, let’s be aware of its enormous and ever-increasing economic and social impact. The Internet is an economic powerhouse that drives U.S. competitiveness and productivity.”

Each state and the federal government should think long and hard before they mess with that.

Originally posted here:
A Case for Free Enterprise

North Carolina Senate Passes Anti-Affiliate Tax Law, Merchants like Amazon Abandon NC Affiliates

It’s no secret that here at Revenews we feel the so called “Amazon Tax” laws enacted by New York are a poor idea. This week North Carolina followed in New York’s steps passing Senate Bill 202 (pdf) which is expected to be ratified quickly.

Calling the law “unconstitutional” Amazon sent a letter (pdf) to all North Carolina affiliates in its Amazon Associates program saying it would terminate their participation in the program once the law is enacted. Since the bill has yet to be signed into law the move is a preemptive one Amazon’s part. While no merchant should dump their affiliates in such a cavalier way, hopefully the news around Amazon’s move can be used as last ditch leverage in petition against the legislation.

To date anti-affiliate legislation has been either delayed or dismissed in California, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee. Affiliate Voice has a current list of the status of pending affiliate tax legislation in various states here.

Want to know what you can do? Here are some opportunities to become involved:

• Matt Enders, OPM MGEcom, is opening their offices in North Carolina for discussions on Monday, June 22 at 2:00 pm and is then coordinating an effort at the state capitol on Tuesday, June 23 with the following schedule:
  8:00 am: meeting time at the North Carolina General Assembly
  8:30 am: House Finance Committee standing weekly meeting
  1:00 pm: Senate Finance Committee standing weekly meeting
• Affiliate Voice is holding an Internet Tax Issue Education Call this Wednesday, June 21st. The call starts at 12:30pm and is free. To join in the discussion click here to register.
• Affiliate Summit and Buy.at are hosting a Tax Talk & Crab Feast on Thursday, July 9 in Baltimore. The event focusing on tax discussion kicks off at 4pm. Click here for information.
• Both the Performance Marketing Association and Affiliate Voice are two industry organizations who are helping to coordinate efforts to combat such anti-affiliate laws.

WickedFire Flap Causes Facebook to Face Click Fraud Problem

The WickedFire forums tend to be a bit of a Wild West, which makes it ironic the forum was helped bring to light a click fraud issue with Facebook’s PPC ads. According to TechCrunch rather than the normal bot issues that occur in search creating false clicks the issue centered around Facebook’s own system “charging for clicks that didn’t exist at all”. A member of Facebook’s communications team eventually responded to the hubbub saying that Facebook “took click quality seriously” and was “addressing the issue”.

MySpace Cuts 30% of its Staff

MySpace announced drastic cutbacks in its staff this week, eliminating at least 30% of its workforce. The move came as cost cutting measure as the company attempts to remake itself in the face of declining advertising revenue and user base.

Yahoo Rolls Out My Display Ads

In an attempt to gain a share of the hyper localized ad market, Yahoo has rolled out My Display Ads self service ad system. The local ad market is an estimated 13.6 billion according to AdAge which provides Yahoo plenty of incentive to leverage its relationship with AdReady.

Ted Murphy, Kerri Pollard get Wrapped up in Michael Arrington’s Drama

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington likes to mix things up. This week he took a shot at IZEA continuing an old feud from the PayPerPost days. Basically anti-spam advocate Andy Sernovitz  pointed out to Arrington that IZEA was grabbing affiliate links through Commission Junction to promote advertisers it didn’t have a direct relationship with through its IZEA Partner Network. Arrington’s main point of contention was that IZEA was leveraging these affiliate relationships to endanger advertisers with the FTC by spamming links across Twitter.

The story was perfect linkbait garnering lots of attention including comments by Commission Junction General Manager Kerri Pollard and a tête-à-tête between Arrington and IZEA CEO Ted Murphy.

What Michael Arrington fails to recognize is that advertisers participating in any affiliate network have the right to choose to either manually or automatically approve their affiliate partners. Either way by letting IZEA into their program the advertiser is essentially agreeing to IZEA’s methods of promotion. Arrington’s concern about lack of disclosure with sponsored posts is valid and should be taken into consideration by both Ted Murphy and CJ (which already stated it would implement greater disclosure).

Unfortunately Arrington’s current method of communicating valid concerns simply amount to a lot of entertaining sound and fury.

Read the original:
Cashing Out: Week of June 14th-21st 2009 in Online Marketing News

Posted by Kendra Intihar, Administrative Assistant, Google Lenoir

Whether you’re shopping for shoes, planning a trip or watching a funny video, you probably don’t think much about where that website you’re on actually “lives.” Though they seem just to exist in some “cloud” out there in “cyberspace,” all websites are actually hosted on computers, similar to the one you have at home or work. But millions of websites processing terabytes of data every day — all of those shopping and video queries — require much more than a single machine, and they need to be housed somewhere. While some webmasters may run their website off of a small server in their basement, more commonly websites are run off of a stack of computers (a server rack), which lives in a warehouse-type building called a data center. Almost any company that stores or processes information either owns data centers or leases space in them, including banks, insurers, airlines and of course, technology companies. To process the millions of searches, emails, documents and more that come across our servers every day, and to keep all of our services both fast and reliable for our users, we require significant computing power, and have invested heavily in servers and data centers across the world.

On May 21st, an official ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the opening of our newest data center in Lenoir, North Carolina. The Lenoir facility has set a precedent for Google community involvement: hundreds of our closest friends — the citizens of Caldwell County — came on site for what we called a “Googley BBQ.” Along with pulled pork from the locally-acclaimed Hannah’s, attractions included Google-colored snow cones, cotton candy, a local cover band, Google demo stations, a “Meet-a-Googler” tent, and a kiddie area with face painting, stickers, crafts, and (of course) a bouncy house in Google colors.

Lenoir sits in the heart of Caldwell County, which is known for its spectacular views of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, its close-knit communities, and its hard-working citizens, and is along the famous “20 miles of furniture” on N.C. highway 321. Though many furniture industry jobs in the area have been lost in recent years, now technology companies are moving to the region, and a focus on technology education is helping to usher Caldwell into the 21st century.

Several speakers at the ribbon-cutting, including the Mayor of Lenoir, David Barlow; County Commissioner Herb Greene; and the Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley, voiced this sentiment, each hopeful that other technology companies will consider Google’s presence and set up shop as well. What’s not to love about an area with a beautiful landscape, a home-town feel, and such a wonderful and welcoming community? Yeah, we couldn’t find anything either.

Lenoir Googlers are still floating on at least cloud seven or eight about playing host at our new site. We couldn’t have done it without the local firefighters, police, Chamber of Commerce and government representatives who went out of their way to make sure everyone had fun that day — helped, of course, by the hundreds of folks who joined us in celebrating. But what’s more, we are excited that we will soon be bringing this newest data center online, as another step to ensure that our services remain lightning fast and nearly 100% reliable, no matter where on the planet you may be.

Here’s a photo album from the day:

Read more:
Opening our doors in Lenoir