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Attending the yearly conference circuit makes me sometimes  feel like conference organizers learned their trade by watching ranchers herd sheep. Rather like little “woolies” shuttled from pasture to pasture, each attendee is branded with the conference tag then guided to a designated corral where people cluster about in glassy-eyed clumps while the conference speakers drone on, unheard, about their heads until it’s time to break for the food trough or the after party.  It’s irritating that even the after party  inevitably involves more milling about and speeches which could be borne if it was felt that organizers actually gave  a damn about attendees.

Because of this I, for one, will miss Gnomedex. Now that Chris Pirillo has announced that after a decade, Gnomedex as a conference has come to end. As a community we are the poorer for it, since few conferences are smart enough to understand that the show is about the attendees.

Year after year Chris has put on events that not only highlighted cutting edge trends, but featured speakers you wouldn’t hear elsewhere, and did it all while erasing the perceived gap between star and attendee. As Dave Winer put it, this was the kind of show you wanted to pay for,

personal loyalty to Chris and Ponzi, or knowing that it’s not a big corporation putting on the show, not sure what it is but it never occurs to me to ask for a comp.”

From someone like Dave Winer, who has made his name on harsh, opinionated critique, this is high praise indeed.

In the past when colleagues have asked me about Gnomedex I found myself saying it was a conference where no business happened; almost as a way to discourage them from attending if all they wanted to do was the usual “conference thing”.  Then I would quickly add that unlike SXSW, which is a sort of Spring Break for Geeks, Gnomedex was more than simply a social event. Instead, this was a conference with a strong creative streak that always left me feeling re-energized, brimming with new ideas.  While  session topics may not have been related directly to business they provided the type of fuel that feeds the spirit, entrepreneurial or metaphysical.

I attended every Gnomedex since 2007, four in all. As a small thank you to Chris, here are my top five examples of sessions that made Gnomedex great:

1)      I Want to Drive the Mars Rover Robot

Geeks have a fascination with space, and I am no exception. When Scott Maxwell, Mars Rover Driver Team Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stepped on stage he had the audience in the palm of his hands. Scott playfully informed the audience that NASA simply doesn’t have enough mathematicians and that through the use of social media it hopes to engage enthusiasts who literally wanted to help  solve NASA’s problems. When he asked who wanted to help him drive the Mars Rover robot, the audience nearly raised the roof.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2)      At Derek K. Miller’s Bedside

As a society we are not good at talking about illness. Often, either consciously or not, those who are ill become sequestered by those who are because people are unsure how to talk around the elephant in the living room. Which is why when Chris Pirillo, after informing the audience that long time attendee Derek K. Miller was too ill in his fight with cancer to attend, turned to the big screen,  and transported everyone to Derek’s bedside live, it was just an amazing moment. Watching Derek interact with the audience and the audience with him was the kind of intimacy most conferences are too self-conscious or unaware of to attempt.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3)      The Calacanis and Winer Tango

Prior to attending Gnomedex I was used to audiences being overly polite to speakers, even if they feel a speaker is feeding them a load of bull. Which is why it was so refreshing to witness Dave Winer pick up on the audience sentiment and yell out at Jason Calacanis, who was simultaneously denouncing spammers on one hand and pitching his product with the other, “Jason what about conference spam, aren’t you spamming us?” (Watch below at about the 7:45 mark) This incident lead to a variety of drama online but  it was thrilling to witness the audience not just sit there passively while the speaker broke the tenant of Gnomedex “don’t pitch”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4)      Invisible People in the Auditorium

It is easy to dismiss Mark Horvath as a hustler. Perhaps there is a little bit of him that still feels like he is still panhandling, albeit with a larger audience, and occasionally some jive slips in. It is easy to judge Mark, but I dare anyone to deny the efforts he has gone through to help the homeless find a voice. It’s a daunting task, making people sitting in cushy chairs sipping Starbucks and feeding off of wifi, think  about the plight of  the homeless, even for a moment. So, in 2009, when Mark introduced James, a homeless man who lived in Nicklesville, Seattle’s homeless “tent city” (video below of Mark’s interview with James at the camp for InvisiblePeople.tv). Mark did what he does very well which is wake up the audience and get them to re-evaluate what’s important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

5)      I Like Cyborgs with My Cultural Anthropology

There have been so many great geek moments at Gnomedex, like Nathan Wade’s Serial Cyborg project, that I was hard pressed to round out the top 5. But Amber Case’s look at prosthetic culture and cyborg anthropology was simply a lot of nerdy fun. She won me over with her  comparison between trilobites shedding their eyes to the way we shed computer screens as part of our visual input.

Fond Farewell

For my part I am as proud that ReveNews was able to provide coverage for Gnomedex 2008 as well as be a sponsor of Gnomedex 10. I am also honored that in 2009 I got a brief unforgettable 10 minutes  to discuss the impact of the Amazon Tax.

I hope that Gnomedex as a conference isn’t gone forever but morphs into something that we the audience can continue to plug into.

To Chris Pirillo (featured to the right sporting the latest in geek fashion) and the dedicated staff of Gnomedex, I say thanks for the memories.

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A Fond Farewell: Five Reasons Gnomedex Will Be Missed

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As city and state governments scramble to make up for growing budget shortfalls we’ve seen the passing of some fairly ludicrous legislation. From the Amazon Tax passed by New York, Rhode Island, and North Carolina to Colorado Governor Bill Ritter’s “Dirty Dozen” which included a tax on bull semen, we’ve seen a lot of ridiculous legislation in 2010.

Enter the city of Philadelphia whose government seems to think that blogging is the next big untapped treasure trove of tax revenue. Philadelphia has imposed a privilege license on all bloggers who reside in the city limits. Cost of the tax, $300.

According to tax attorney Michael Mandale as long as a blog is engaged in an “activity for profit” for example taking any advertisement including Google AdSense, the city of Philadelphia’s “blogging tax” applies to them. By such a definition blogs or sites on communities like Squidoo, Livejournal and platforms like WordPress and TypePad would be subject to such a tax.

The thing is a lot of people who blog do so as a hobby or a form of self expression. They may put up an occasional link to Amazon or to Fandango because of a book or movie they have seen but most are not making a living off of blogging. In fact both local bloggers interviewed by the Philadelphia City Paper made less than $50 over two years. But as Michael Mandale points out the law applies whether or not the blogger “earned a profit during the preceding year.”

Interestingly the way the law is written it would exempt most corporate blogs from being taxed separately because most corporations do not display advertising on their blog.

Now, I don’t fault the Philadelphia city government for searching for new tax revenue resources especially when faced with the crisis of a budget shortfall. In fact, I would classify myself as generally pro tax. But this law is just misguided for many reasons.

1. Jurisdiction: The law is targeting the blogger who hopes to earn a profit through advertising. Fine. But what if a blogger living in Philly blogs on a third party site, say they setup a Squidoo Lens, but chooses not to run their own advertising. Let’s say the third part site then decides to run advertising triggered by the blogger’s content. Seems wrong that the small blogger would be taxed but the larger business (the site) would be allowed to make a profit untouched.  Philadelphia having no jurisdiction over matters outside of its city limits could never impose the tax on a site outside of its city limits. Yet, in the scenario above it could not tax the site for the very same content and potential profits that it is trying to tax the blogger for.
2. Enforcement:By the city’s own admission they do not keep track of how many bloggers reside in their city limits. In fact it might be an impossible task at least from a resource standpoint, not just for Philly but for any city, to actively enforce such a law. So the only people this law taxes (punishes) are those honest enough to come forward and pay it.
3. What Content is Taxable?: The supposition here is that the blogger is seeking out advertisers and the revenue from ads should be taxed. But I’m sure that the city officials are thinking about traditional display style ads. What about in-text ads or outright advertorial? Are those taxable? If so, how will the city enforce? What about, as mentioned earlier, blog content from a large business or corporate entity? Such a blog isn’t likely to have advertising but essentially does serve a marketing/advertising purpose for the company that created it. Is that taxable? Will companies then be required to pay two taxes: one for their business license and one for the privilege of having a blog?
4. Small Business Growth: In a city that is trying to encourage small business growth, as Philadelphia claims to, aren’t such tax measures a great way to hamper such growth? Bloggers who become successful enough through their writing will naturally evolve into businesses that bring in new tax revenue. Government should be cultivating business growth not burying it before it has a chance to flourish.

In Philadelphia there is already an effort to reform the current business privilege tax put forward by local City Council members Bill Green and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez so that the law wouldn’t apply to business that had not generated over $100,000 in revenue. While I applaud that effort, government tends to be a bit of “monkey see, monkey do.”

Among the repercussions of New York’s passing of the Amazon Tax, was that various states lined up to follow New York’s lead without really looking at the impact of the legislation. Don’t be surprised if a city near you follows in Philly’s footsteps.

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Blogging Tax Coming To A City Near You

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There are sure signs that Amazon is worried about Apple’s iPad. Their focus on rolling out a “cheap” version of the new Kindle WiFi, scheduled to ship August 27^th with a $139 starting price point compared to the current $189 version, will undoubtedly tempt some customers to rush out and buy one.

But Amazon shouldn’t be worried about the iPad as a Kindle killer. They should be thinking about India, not Apple.

When the new Kindle is compared to India’s $35 laptop,  and its price target of $10,  it looks a lot less attractive.

In a previous piece, I wrote off the $35 laptop as a wannabe computer because it lacked a number of important features, like the ability to store the large amounts of data usually associated with a hard disk or high capacity solid state drive. I still stand by this opinion.

But when the laptop is looked at as an alternative, cheap ebook reader in comparison to the Kindle or Apple’s iPad, it easily wins hands-down. This makes it especially attractive to me since I said I’d buy an ebook reader if it was priced below $50.

In India, targeting the ebook reader market could potentially be a match made in heaven, especially if you factor in that India’s schools are moving towards using laptops as a textbook replacement.

The one-time capital expenditure incurred with purchasing these computers would be than offset by the paper savings. Schools could load textbooks in an ebook format rather than stock their printed equivalents. And there’s more than ample time to recoup the costs over the 4-year or 10-year academic cycle of the students using them.

That’s fine for India, but what about us?

A $35 ebook reader could revitalize reading for a generation weaned on the Internet, video games, and cell phones. But it’s not a perfect solution because the laptop’s Linux OS will likely need a tweak or mod to be anywhere near the usability of the Apple OS. An intuitive user interface and a suite of useful apps would make it even more attractive.

After all, what’s a platform without widgets, apps and content?  And while apps are meant to up sell a device and distract the buyer with toys in order to pay more for a phone or for a reading device they have been the bugbear of many new computing platforms, whether you’re referring to the Palm PDA, Sharp Zaurus or until recently, the iPod.

But there are practical issues before India slays the Kindle. Costs associated with marketing, importing, and distribution to other countries have a way of inflating price. And, while hip with geeks, Linux hardly has adoption among the masses.

But with a $35 price point the India laptop has an advantage in low market cost over any device.  It does face an obstacle in regards to access to a reading inventory. It’s doubtful, after all, that Amazon will hand over theirs. Fortunately, having such an inventory accessible is a small hurdle, especially when there is quality content available, like the 33,000 books found at sites like Project Gutenberg.

Combine this inventory with cross platform compatibility into other ebook stores and the $35 laptop is suddenly an attractive proposition. The point is that as an ebook reader a device such as the one India has developed has tantalizing prospects and the ability to create market shift as well as be a potential Kindle killer.

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Last week, Missy Ward, co-founder of Affiliate Summit, reignited the age-old discussion about what we call our industry. Is it affiliate marketing or performance marketing? Are we affiliates or publishers? Are they merchants or advertisers? Either you think this is important or you are thinking What?! Who cares?!? Still I think the topic is worth a few minutes of your reading time.

What’s in a name?

In years past, I didn’t want to be called an affiliate for two reasons. I don’t really care much about one reason anymore. That one is that there are so many people who give Affiliate Marketing a bad name. There are bad actors everywhere. We’ve come a long way to marginalize these guys… yes, but we still have a long way to go. Either we clean it up or someone else will do it for us.

The more important issue then, and HUGELY important today has to do with what the term affiliate means and how it is being used against us. I am not an affiliate because affiliate links are just one way that we monetize our sites. Why focus on that reason? Of course, the last time I brought this up, Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit, expanded Affiliate Marketing to include just about everything that we could include for monetization. I don’t think that AdSense is an affiliate program but Shawn does (or at least did). I don’t think that we’ll ever agree and entering into a cyclical argument is pointless.

Enter the California State Legislature… and many other states as well

When we went to Sacramento to lobby against AB178 (aka the Advertising Tax) we were told by our advisers not to focus on monetization types or compensation. It seems that to create nexus under the Advertising Tax, an affiliate needs to be compensated on a percentage of sales basis (aka cost per acquisition or CPA). So if we have a link on Cashbaq to a product being sold at Overstock and Overstock pays us a percentage of sales for that product, Overstock would have nexus in California and would be required to collect California sales tax if the Advertising Tax were to pass.

If you drive two three miles down the road to Shopzilla, you would see their nice offices. They too are located in the city of Los Angeles, but they won’t create nexus for Overstock with a link to that same product at Overstock for the same price. Why? Because a link to that same product at the same store for the same price would be compensated on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. Shopzilla isn’t an affiliate because of the way it gets paid. That’s advertising.

Are you following this? Neither are our state legislators, such nuances are beyond them. While there is no logic to the taxation we can follow the consequences of such actions to their logical conclusion.

The Logical Conclusion

Ultimately, I don’t care what as an industry we are called. Legislators will define us in their own terms regardless of whether we call ourselves performance marketers or affiliates. The threats to our industry are more important than a debate about what shingle we hang out. Should the Advertising Tax pass and become law in California, many Web-only stores will terminate their relationships with their affiliates. Pure and simple.

The largest ones will be able to switch to a CPC compensation and keep their relationships with their advertisers (Note that loyalty sites will have great difficulty under this scenario and will have to have fewer stores, move out of state or shut down). That means smaller companies will bear the brunt of the burden of such a tax. Many will be forced to shut their doors. Of course, the irony is that small business are generally the ones that lead the economies out of recessions; and California is so heavily tech dependent.

A Personal Note on Dinner

Oh and Missy, dinner is at 7:00. Don’t be late!

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So Facebook is no stranger to privacy criticism. But between trying to become the default social web and Mark Zuckerberg declaring the end of privacy, the social network is coming under more fire than ever. In fact, accusing Facebook of being drunk on dreams of world domination, Wired’s own Ryan Singel recently put out a call for an open alternative.

But the pitiful reality is that Facebook isn’t evil (well, at least not categorically). They’re behaving just as “responsibly” as we’d expect any private enterprise to: they’re trying their darndest to establish a monopoly in their marketplace.

It just so happens that they’re in the business of trading/selling our data. But there’s nothing forcing us to give it to them, so we should stop sniveling about consequences of our own reckless whims and accept that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Freedoms, Privacy, and the Media

If you live in a Western liberal-democracy, then you enjoy a whole bunch of rights that are protected under the law. And chances are that those rights include some degree of privacy, and freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and so on. But even though they’re protected under the law, those rights and freedoms have their limits.

Take your privacy rights, for example. Once you leave the privacy of our own home, so many of them go out the window.

For instance, once you’re in a public space, a journalist can snaps photos and shoot stock footage of you without your permission because (1) you’re in a public space, and (2) they have freedoms of the press that allow them to document the world around them. Similarly, if you enter onto private property, such as a shopping mall, it is perfectly legal for you to be subject to CCTV or other surveillance systems.

So when you’re not in the privacy of your own home, your privacy rights are limited.

And take freedom of speech and freedom of expression. In a liberal-democracy, we all have the right to express ourselves. But that doesn’t entitle us to access to broadcast media.

We are all entitled to share our thoughts with our friends, family, and colleagues. But if we want to broadcast those thoughts in print or over the airways, we need to raise the financing ourselves – just like any other private media enterprise.

The point is that the rights and freedoms that we have as private individuals are limited to the privacy of our individuality. Once we leave the confines of our homes or try to exercise those rights on a wide scale basis, they are seriously limited.

No Free Lunch: Facebook & Privacy

Coming back to Facebook, there are three reasons why we shouldn’t expect complete and utter privacy protections: (1) the Facebook community is a privately owned space beyond the confines of our own home; (2) Facebook is a media platform that we are not entitled to under the law; and (3) Facebook is a service provided by a private enterprise that has to turn a profit.

First, Facebook does not belong to any of us. It belongs to shareholders. And those shareholders can dictate any terms of entry they like. In this case, accessing Facebook requires that we share personal data. If we don’t want to share that data, then we just have to forego using Facebook. That is all.

Second, social networks are just another wide scale media, like television or newspapers. Although they facilitate our freedoms of expression, speech, and assembly, they are not integral to them.

There are still plenty of other ways for us to interact with other people; they’re just not as convenient. So if Facebook wants to make relinquishing our privacy a condition of accessing their platform, they are entitled to do so.

Finally, Facebook’s is a profit driven enterprise whose revenue model is based on user date. The only reason they can offer their service free of charge is because they can aggregate their users’ data and use it to offer marketing services. If their default was privacy, their business model would collapse, and there’d be no more Facebook.

The Face of Privacy

In the article calling for a open alternative to Facebook, Ryan Singel pointed out how Facebook’s popularity has demonstrated that “We want easier ways to share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers and even, sometimes, the world.” The only problem is that we are not willing to pay for it.

Facebook is one of those services that hit critical mass because it is free to use. Had there ever been any cost barriers to registering with the site, it would’ve never taken off the way it had.

The catch is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. As with every free online service, we must expect that there are strings attached to our using them. So, just as we have certain privacy rights under the law, we must also waive those rights when we want to enjoy someone else’s private property.

That being said, it seems that if most Facebook users were given the choice, Facebook would have to be a bit more prudent with their personal data. Of course, the only way that Facebook users could be offered the choice would be through an alternative to Facebook.

The question that remains is twofold: (1) is user disenchantment sufficient to justify a viable competitor to Facebook? And (2) how could such a competitor foot the costs of development if they weren’t selling their users’ data?

The likely answer to both questions is “no.” Rather, what we can probably expect to see is Facebook to continuing to probe the privacy limits of its users until they strike that happy balance between lip-service privacy protection and record profits.

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My fellow affiliate marketers, welcome to Part 2 of the State of Affiliate Marketing Union.  I shared some of the wonderful things that affiliate marketing has going for it, including phenomenal growth despite the recession, in my post earlier this week. I feel the state of the affiliate marketing union is strong, but faces many challenges in the coming year.

And now the bad news. Surely, you knew it was coming. There are no silver lining comes without a cloud after all. First there is taxes then there is everything else…

Our Biggest Challenge

All kidding aside, there are serious challenges facing the affiliate marketing industry in the coming year. Unless you are an affiliate that’s been living under a rock, you know about the offspring of the so-called Amazon Tax which was first enacted in New York. Since that time the states of Rhode Island, and North Carolina passed similar legislation; and California and Hawaii came within a hair’s breadth of passing their own versions but thankfully the governors of those states vetoed the legislation.  Even now, though, it is still not a dead issue in those states and we face new challenges like the current one in Colorado as well as in Vermont, Virginia, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Maine, South Carolina, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, West Virginia, and my home state of Tennessee.

Don’t see your state listed above? Consider yourself lucky, but odds are that such a tax will be proposed in your state or a bordering state very soon. Now with the aforementioned states enacting and others looking to follow, inevitable budget crises will see it occur in more states as they do whatever it takes to raise more revenue. You, Mr. or Ms. Affiliate, are the perfect target.

The time for apathy and inaction is over. The time for getting really ticked off and acting is now!

Let me put that another way: Get off your butt. Quit thinking it’s going to go away or that there is nothing you can do. Get mad and do something about it.

This is a call to arms. I don’t care if you hate politics, if you are a Democrat, Republican, or not even old enough to vote. Your jobs are at stake in some cases. Your very livelihood, if you do this full time, is on the line every time some half-witted state representative introduces legislation in a futile attempt to raise revenue through affiliates since they see Amazon as an easy target. Monkey see, monkey do.

I’ll step off the soapbox just in time and leave it at this: It’s not an exaggeration to say that the advertising tax is a serious threat to our industry so please join me and others in doing something about it!

What exactly can you do about it?

Numerous people: including Rebecca Madigan of the Performance Marketing Association, Melanie Seery of Affiliate Advocacy, to Brian Littleton of ShareASale, have made the following list of resources and ideas available.

First, get educated. Learn more about pending bills in your state. Seek out information from organizations like the Performance Marketing Association or Affiliate Advocacy. Learn what your state laws currently are and what the threat level is in your state.

The threat level is high in every state that has a sales tax. Assume the threat level is Code Red and act like it.

Second, visit the affiliate forums like ABestWeb which has an Affiliate Tax Laws category and look for the forum on tax laws in your state. If the forum does not have an active thread on your state, start something. Let others know you want to fight this! It only takes one eager and active affiliate to spark a fire in many others.

Next, get a list of state Representatives, Senators, and other important elected officials. This is easily attainable through your local state government website. Once you have the facts, be proactive, build out your network of friends, media contacts and discussions about the harmful potential of such legislation. Most importantly reach out to you’re the fellow affiliates in your state.  If your state is not a serious threat now, it could be, so the time for organizing is now.

Be vigilant; if legislation is proposed be prepared to reach out to your representative legislators. Go to their offices, get to know their staff, send them emails and letters, make phone calls, and encourage others to do the same. Tell them your story. So many of them don’t understand the details so let them know that a real person is behind this, a real person with a real job that stands to suffer greatly if such a tax is passed.

Tell them how it will cost people their jobs. Inform them that early data is showing that the states like Rhode Island that have enacted similar legislation are showing no revenue from the tax. None!

Recently, affiliates in Colorado set a great example for the rest of us with 150 affiliates very active in the fight. Unfortunately the Colorado House just passed HB 1193 and the Senate Finance Committee moved to bring to the whole Chamber. Here is an excellent article by Scott Jangro that provides a recap of what happened in Colorado.

What a wonderful example of affiliates coming together to fight this!

Apathy is the biggest enemy to beating these taxes and saving our industry. Apathy is what keeps us home on a cold day instead of driving to a boring committee meeting at the state legislature. Apathy is what makes us think that a simple email to our legislator won’t make a difference. Apathy is what leads to the tax being passed and a slew of merchant terminations (note: Many merchants like us are taking a stand and not terminating affiliates at all, or providing support in our fight).

Beyond the Advertising Tax

After the advertising tax issues, the biggest ongoing challenge for many affiliates is the seemingly fickle nature of Google. Just because Google now operates an affiliate network doesn’t mean affiliate sites don’t still get Google Slapped.

I experienced this problem first hand. Sites that had done very well for many years suddenly disappeared from both the natural listings and paid listings in Google. In about two-thirds of the cases we encountered, the sites were doing everything right, according to Google’s own best practice standards, leaving both the affiliate and me totally bewildered and wondering what to do next. In a nutshell, their demise really, really sucked.

A quick look through the various forums provides some comfort when we find that this is not some sort of attack on review site affiliates or our industry, but rather what seems to be an all-out assault on all kinds of sites combined with the fickleness of the Google algorithm. Thankfully, in December of last year and in January of this year saw many of our affiliate sites climb out of the depths and re-emerge stronger than ever, with a few tweaks that we worked out together. We are cautiously optimistic that the changes we made will work long-term.

The Launch of New Under-Prepared Affiliate Programs

On the surface that may not seem like a challenge or threat to the industry at all, but I have noticed an explosion in affiliate programs that never should have been launched in the first place. These programs end up giving good programs, and the industry as a whole, a bad name.

Now, more than ever, I am seeing programs that are run unethically, programs with horrible trained affiliate managers if they have any managers at all. These programs seem to have a general attitude towards their affiliates that borders on downright contempt and disdain. Unfortunately, they are doing a good enough job of attracting many new affiliate marketers to their programs with their offers; to only then horribly represent our industry and leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Often times good programs never get a chance to even work with aspiring new affiliates and the advertisers who may have launched with good if misguided intentions never give the affiliate channel a chance to grow.  We all lose as a result.

In the coming year, my hope is that more and more unethical and shady programs will be brought to light and that the industry as a whole will do more to stand up to these merchants. Maybe through adopting an industry wide set of best practices. It’s in all of our best interests to put a barrier up to the bad ones, and to educate those who genuinely want to run good programs.

Thanks for reading. It’s hard to believe that there are less than eleven months left in 2010. I know for many of you, it is shaping up to be a record year.  If we stand together we can make it a great one.

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The Way I See It: State of Affiliate Marketing Part 2

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Affiliate marketing indeed is a cutthroat industry, but never in my opinion have I seen such a display of cold and calculated ruthlessness.

Under the guise of working towards stopping Colorado’s version of the so-called Amazon Tax, and in front of industry counterparts and members of the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) gathered to testify against the Senate version of HB 1193, ShopAtHome took the opportunity to flex its muscles.

Earlier Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director of the PMA, had emphasized how crucial it was for affiliates to present a cohesive front so that the negative impact such a bill would have on small business in Colorado would be readily understood by legislators.

With apparent disregard for the unity in message theme, Marc Braunstein, Co-Founder of the Belcaro Group who owns large affiliate ShopAtHome, did the industry no favors when he presented his testimony to the Senate Finance Committee.

In an unanticipated move, instead of giving testimony as to how the bill would hurt Colorado businesses, he stated in its current form he was not opposed to the legislation. Despite the fact that, according to his own figures his business might suffer a drop of 20% in revenue if the bill was passed, he assured senators that the legislation would not hurt ShopAtHome. He further stated that the intended targets of the bill, Amazon and Overstock who are expected to terminate Colorado affiliates, were of little significance to him and, that after a short educational period, advertisers would return to ShopAtHome because of their compelling model.

But Marc Braunstein didn’t stop there. He used his time on the microphone to flaunt ShopAtHome’s sales numbers, their ability to retain legal advisors to deal with such legislative matters, and even managed to suck up enough to the Senators that one suggested Marc should look into getting a binding exemption to the tax.

Now I don’t fault Marc for looking after his own business. Any shrewd business man might do so. And this is still a free country, Mr. Braunstein can use his time in a public forum as he sees fit.

I fault Marc for throwing fellow Colorado affiliates under the bus despite having no compelling reason to do so. Marc didn’t do so out of necessity, he did so because in his mind they were small and insignificant. He could have leveraged the size and obvious importance of ShopAtHome’s standing in Colorado to support his fellow affiliates. Rather his grandstanding robbed affiliates of their valuable time in front of legislators who have the power to devastatingly impact their business. He was a one man filibuster.

In an industry that is full of cutthroats it is hard to stand out. But as many affiliates in the industry said on Twitter, Marc just won the public douche bag award. I hope he’s proud.

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ShopAtHome Stabs Fellow Colorado Affiliates in the Back

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My fellow affiliate marketers, the state of the affiliate marketing union is strong, but faces many challenges in the coming year.

For many affiliates and affiliate programs, 2009 was another banner year as the affiliate channel continues to grow. Despite all of the economic calamities and constant new reports about rising unemployment, company failures, and global financial meltdowns, most affiliate marketers that I know were either immune to all of the noise or more likely just ignored the doom and gloom and pressed forward.

Take our program for example. Our fourth quarter affiliate sales were up 62 percent from 2008 to 2009. As I said in our recent affiliate newsletter, “Recession my butt!” Most companies are satisfied or even ecstatic with 10 percent growth year to year in a good economy, so 62 percent growth is pretty good in a “down economy.”

That sentiment was echoed by Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and ShareASale in the recent 2010 Affiliate Industry Preview Series. All experienced phenomenal growth despite the recession.

The reason is simple. Affiliates are a resilient bunch.  In the program I manage, I never once got an email asking how the economy is affecting sales or when sales would pick back up or if there was anyone left who could afford our courses. Instead, what I got was an optimistic and excited bunch of affiliates who came up with innovate ways to generate sales despite the recession.

Affiliate marketers, as a rule, are familiar with adversity. We are used to being Google Slapped, laughed at by our friends with “real jobs,” and testing far too many ideas that never should have made it off the drawing board in the first place, often failing miserably. We are used to failure after failure in order to find the one thing that actually works.

As Pinnacle Award Affiliate of the Year finalist, Eric Nagel once told me, “I usually try ten things, nine of them fail, and I stick with the one that works.” So affiliate marketers tend to overlook a little recession with ease.

All in all, I found that our affiliates and the industry as a whole could not care less about any of the bad news coming from the television and newspapers. I have found an industry that is marching forward and leaving the worriers, naysayers, and pessimists in its dust.

Forrester Research confirms the continued potential growth of affiliate marketing expecting the industry to grow by double digits in 2010 and to become a $4 billion market by 2014. That is over a 100 percent increase over the expected 2009 numbers!

Indeed it is an exciting time to be in affiliate marketing.

This is not to say that there is not a place for caution and organized action against threats to our industry. I did say in the beginning that the industry faces many challenges in the coming year after all. I will cover those in part two, so stay tuned.

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The Way I See It: State of Affiliate Marketing Part 1

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As a blogger and an ex-newspaper reporter I have an axe to grind with many of my peers. Please avoid the temptation to distort reality by quoting statistics and data out of context, no matter how linkbait worthy the intended headline or story angle might be.

What raised my hackles? I read this eWeek article and choked when I saw this line:

“Twitter boasted astronomical growth, up 1,170 percent from its negligible .15 percent market share from September 2008″.

I decided to check out the source, Experian Hitwise’s press release on social network traffic, and examine their report using my own calculations:

Twitter September 2009 social network market share of a whopping 1.84% is 12.26 times (or 1,226%) of it’s 0.15% September 2008 figure. This is derived by taking 1.84 divided by 0.15 (1.84/0.15).

Taking a leaf out of a grade school math book, the increase in traffic can be calculated by the following formula:

Percentage Increase = [(new figure - old figure) / old figure] * 100% which should be [(1.84-0.15)/0.15]*100% = 1,127% or an increase of 11.27 times over the previous figure.

So where did the 1,170% figure mentioned in Hitwise’s release come from? Beats me. Maybe someone was a little lax in checking their own stats.

Should we be concerned when a web measurement firm whose bread and butter comes from reporting data, reports it inaccurately? If the reported data is incorrect, how about the validity of the web data contained the report? What happens when a respected media outlet like eWeek publishes data verbatim, without running their own checks to verify accuracy provided by a newsmaker?

Quality control of data is obviously an issue.

Even more interesting is the 1,127% or 1,170% year-on-year growth figure attributed to Twitter’s growth. Everyone loves to see impressive numbers, especially if it’s in multiples of 100%.

Mark Twain popularized the phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Statistics are powerful because they are viewed as logic based.  In school math was the only subject you could get a perfect score in, and that thinking has carried over into adult life. People like seeing statistics, no matter how skewed, because it makes them feel secure in the information they have been given. When delivered by a smart PR firm, marketing team, or in the media the data is often accepted without question. 

This is because most individuals (internet marketers included) are inherently bad at math and numbers in general. Whether by choice or circumstances, they just aren’t equipped to deal with data critically or intelligently.

I’ve seen more than a few isolated instances where writers cite 500% growth or 1,270% increase in profit, but does this mean anything?

Context is key if you want to make sense of data. A sales increase from $1 to $5 is an increase of 400%, and publishing an article announcing a 400% increase will get you more than your fair share of eyeballs. However, if you consider that $5 would barely pay for lunch, it’s a case where statistics, without appropriate context, can be manipulated to distort reality. What’s important when dealing with data is to look at information against the appropriate backdrop.

If your company is growing at 90%, while comparable peers in the same industry are growing at 300%, you’re lagging behind the industry. By “comparable peers” I’m referring to partners or competitors that are equivalent in size or can be mathematically adjusted to provide a meaningful basis of comparison.

Context and relevance and looking at data in a meaningful way means seeing a $1 billion revenue figure and a net profit margin of 0.5%. Or a 500% monthly sales growth figure from a baseline of $27 in sales. Do these figures mean anything? Only when they’re seen from the perspective of the big picture.

If you want to see the forest and not just the trees, don’t simply swallow the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” they are trying to spoonfeed you.

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Are Reporters and Bloggers Guilty Of Using Weapons of Statistical Destruction?

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This is a tale of two types of internet celebrities: those that fight hard to give back to their community and those that sit on the sidelines.

First, I want to give accolades to the Affiliate Marketers Give Back team who in their third straight year participated in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer raising over $50,000 in the fight against the disease. Having taken part in the walk last year I had the pleasure of seeing firsthand the type of work team leader Missy Ward, Co-Founder of Affiliate Summit, puts in not only to raise awareness of breast cancer and fundraise for the cause  but to help the AMGB team get through the long miles of the walk.

The media is full of talk on how some celebrities use their high profiles to serve as role models. Well Missy, despite her high profile in our community, has always made time for such causes as Big Brother/Big Sisters and the Susan G Komen Foundation. This year the AMGB team Missy assembled consisted of Brook Schaaf of Schaaf Consulting, Chris Pearson of DIYThemes, Melissa Salas of Buy.com, Kevin Strawbridge of DealTaker.com, and Lynette LaPlante a 1-year survivor (all of whom are celebrities in my book!).

Also pledged to the team was Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger. Brian has also become a bit of an online celebrity. But apparently he’s now so famous that he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the Walk on September the 12th and 13th.

Now, it’s understandable to get cold feet at such an event: walking 40 miles in the LA sun is not pleasant. It’s also understandable if some personal or health condition came into play that prevented his participation. But Brian did not only fail to show up to the event, cheer from the sidelines, or provide support during lunch or at dinner; he didn’t even issue one tweet about the event.

Brian Clark is someone who makes his living tweeting and blogging. One tweet from him is valuable; after all he has 35,000 followers. A tweet is the easiest way he could have used to provide support and awareness for everyone involved in the Avon Walk. But apparently even 140 characters was too much to ask.

Instead, Brian occupied himself on Sept 12-13th making inane “not really” tweets with @gapingvoid and quoting George Bernard Shaw. Apparently ‘Man and Superman’ is a concept that Brian is unfamiliar with. Even the strength of the women on his team couldn’t force him to follow through on his commitments.  Maybe someone should send his Kindle the Cliff Notes version.

He didn’t even take the time to respond when AMGB team members teasingly thanked him for providing nonexistent dinner and backrubs at the event. He was a no show in every sense of the term.

Well at least if Brian Clark doesn’t know how to be a team member or role model for his community he can take solace in the fact he’s learned how to handle critisims from drunk Swiss guys. Now that’s insight that’s valuable to everyone.

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You had to be under a rock yesterday to miss the big news: Yahoo took a dose of poison to speed up its death. Rumor has it Steve Ballmer put on a Jack Kevorkian mask to trick Carol Bartz into the deal.

In all seriousness, search has been a confusing place from the beginning and it continues as such. I joined GoTo.com when it was entering the throes of the second phase of search. I have decided to write a different perspective on this with a little long forgotten history. It’s written from my perspective in the industry so if it comes across as self-serving or you want things more clean, just hit the Back button or go read what Danny Sullivan and Jason Calacanis wrote about the deal.

Phase 1: Netscape Built Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek

Netscape was THE browser back in the day (I have to put it that way or my Old Internet Guy will be revoked card). It didn’t have its own search engine but it had a button you could press to get to one of the 4 main search engines. The best part was, it gave them traffic for the price of… FREE!

Mind you, Yahoo wasn’t a search engine. It was a directory that David Filo and Jerry Yang (oh, he commits infanticide later in this story) started as grad students at Stanford.

Not that many readers remember the other early players like:  Excite (bought by ISP @Home and destroyed), Lycos (is that German for search?) or Infoseek (bought by Disney, renamed Go and successfully sued by GoTo over the logo before being shutdown… is Disney even on the Web anymore?), and Altavista (which was a project by Digital to prove the value of its servers. It was at altavista.digital.com. Catchy and user-friendly, huh?)

Phase 2: Netscape wants to charge

Imagine that, people realized there was money in search. The big four weren’t so keen on paying (well, the ones that were not Yahoo stuck around for a small amount). There was a group of upstarts with deep VC pockets and were willing to pay to play. GoTo.com was in there as were AskJeeves (IAC later committed “butlercide”), Looksmart (it was our goal that it didn’t look smart… sorry Claudine and Sean), Go2Net / Infospace and a few others. It was fun even if many portal execs (OK, most portal execs) thought we were doing the work of the devil.

GoTo had one thing going for it (this is the self serving part). Todd Tappin, our CFO, wouldn’t let us sign an unprofitable deal. He did let us bid them up to hurt the others, especially Looksmart. There was one deal Jeffrey Brewer, our fearless CEO, insisted that we sign and pray. It was a bet your business deal. It was, of course, Netscape.

Netscape had an annual bidding process for its search traffic. Minimum $30 CPM and maximum 15% of the traffic. I lobbied to have our offer go in at 25% and 35%. We sent in both with different CPMs and (HOLY SEARCH, BATMAN!) they said yes (after asking if we meant it). Panic. Jeffrey remained calm and said he could get the money if the deal went south. Well, the day it was announced the stock we up 40% (we went public 2 weeks prior) and, much to our surprise, it was profitable due to having 20 keywords listed whenever users saw it. That was an important point in the development of paid search. We briefly messed up the marketplace by driving traffic to specific keywords (at least when we let distribution partners do so).

Needless to say, Ask.com is the only survivor of this class (”We’re #3!!!”). GoTo and Altavista (along with FAST and Inktomi) were bought by Yahoo along with Tim Cadogan (who headed up Yahoo Search for a few years before leaving to found OpenX).

Phase 3: Yahoo Builds Google

Did I really write that Yahoo built Google? Yep. Sure Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the technology but Yahoo marketed the hell out of that thing. From 2000-2004 Yahoo continued to provide only the Yahoo Directory and had its search engine “powered by Google”. This legitimized Google by giving it credibility with Yahoo’s users who soon figured out they could go directly to Google.

Google didn’t have to pay for traffic and Yahoo’s former users didn’t have to search via navigating through 6 clicks to find a site in a directory.

Trip to Mountain View to pitch Google on paid search. Yes, we heard that paid search was not relevant and would never be on Google’s SERPs. And they meant it. It wasn’t a trick. Google’s investors later talked to Larry and Sergey and said that the fractions of a cent for Yahoo search was nice to fund development but was nothing compared to what Google could make with GoTo-like paid search. The VCs won and Larry and Sergei became billionaires.

Google figured out to sign a deal that was great for AOL (rumored to be as high as 100% of revenue plus pre-IPO warrants in Google). What did it get from that? It went from 0 to 100 (that’s in 1,000’s of advertisers) overnight as every GoTo advertiser wanted to keep the gravy train that was newbie AOL users.

Oh, MSN launched a search engine too. To its credit, Microsoft wouldn’t poach employees from its partners so Yahoo (which did) got Tim Cadogan.

Over at Yahoo, Terry Semel stepped in and asked why in hell did Yahoo not have a deal with GoTo to monetize search through text ads. Good question. My first call for GoTo (the week before I started) was to Ben Padnos at Yahoo. We spent a year and a half on a deal that got mucked with a handshake (it’s a long story about two people who used to work together and had the relationship turned upside down on this one… oh, and they didn’t like each other). Terry signed the deal and like it so much he bought the company. He didn’t like the idea that Yahoo didn’t have control of its advertiser base (Carol, are you listening? You really should be.)

Phase 4: The Death of Yahoo and the Rise of MicroLiveBing

You’ve all been following what happened to Yahoo when Jerry Yang turned down Microsoft’s $33 a share offer (Oops). You heard that Microsoft just stole Yahoo’s search business with the original Netscape-sized down payment of FREE.

Yahoo hasn’t done much to improve its search engine since Tim left a couple of years ago. Microsoft (as much as we like to knock it for its poor name choices) has been gobbling up every interesting search company it can find and has been trying to build a better search engine. Microsoft even admitted Google was better by using the exact format of Google’s search results (paid and natural). Now it’s buying marketshare.

That leaves us with Google just shy of 70% of the market (including it’s $1 billion dollar deals with AOL and MySpace), MicroHoo at around 28.5%, Ask.com with a few percent (and lots of Google AdWords results) and a few others.

Phase 5: Can there be new search engines?

I really want to say yes but I don’t see how. Back in the day (again, it’s required along with at the end of the day) search engines could start and they could buy traffic. The deals are sealed with BIG money now. They could also get press and get users. The biggest suck in this vacuum is that Google and Microsoft buy them up when they show any promise. And who amongst the giants wants to compete with Microsoft and Google? I’m hiding behind the handball backstop for this playground brawl. These guys are going at it everywhere!

Google has done a few things well.

• Google is a technology company. Yahoo was not, is not and will not be. GoTo wasn’t either. Microsoft isn’t really. By that I mean that Google produces excellent services. They are fast. They are what users want. They aren’t clunky and relying on old technology.
• Google innovates. Who cares if Orkut is only big in Brazil. Look at everything else that Google gives the world… for FREE!
• Google gives it away for free. Half of Microsoft is Windows and Office. If you wanted to hurt Microsoft, what would you do? Give away an operating system (Chrome OS) and a productivity suite (Google Docs). First Round Capital says that “if your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!” Google uses its significant revenue from search to give everything else away… for FREE! Why? People keep coming back. As much as I want to hate Google, I now have a G1, I use Gmail, etc., etc., etc.

Google isn’t great at marketing, Apple is. Google just builds great technology. It’s winning. If it keeps innovating, it has a good chance of becoming really scary (or even scarier). Think about how many entities’ livelihoods are based on changes to Google’s natural search algorithms and paid search rules. A couple of years ago I read an article on the half-life of tech leaders (I think it was by Josh Kopelman but I can’t find it). IBM’s dominance lasted for 30 years. Microsoft’s for 15 years. Google is past 7 1/2 years. Hmmmm….

I hope that Microsoft succeeds on this one. It hasn’t used its near-monopoly power well in the past. I hope that we can see the market stabilize at 60/40 or to have a real third player (kind of like how I’d like a centrist political party in this country).

My only prediction on this is that there will be a new battle for distribution. Microsoft needs more search traffic. It needs to provide a big base for advertisers to get the CPCs up and to make it worthwhile for us all to spend money there. And it needs the traffic to prove the credibility to the end users and the experts who make the noise that the general public hears. Steve Ballmer has stated that he is willing to spend BILLIONS a year on search for the next 5 years. The man is the world’s first employee billionaire. He seems to know a thing or two.

My only question is this: Microsoft is paying for the search traffic on Facebook. How is it that Facebook still provides 19% of Google’s traffic?

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Good news for Net Neutrality. This administration has shown that they are committed to the principals of Net Neutrality based on language in the rules recently released for the broadband stimulus funding. The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) is offering grants for: deploying broadband infrastructure in un/under-served areas; enhancing broadband capacity in public computer centers; and promoting sustainable broadband adoption projects. The rules require all grant winners to follow the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement as well as specifically calling out neutral traffic routing.

This shows that Net Neutrality is not some impossible to understand arcane rules that is anti-consumer like the opponents try to make you think. Opponents talk about extra government regulation, bureaucracy, and confusion because nobody really knows what it means. If the government can explain it in a few sentences in a 121 page document, then how hard can this concept really be to understand?

These rules are specifically called out and described in the Interconnection and Non-Discrimination Requirements section (Page 113) where they require applicants to commit to five obligations (page 114):

1. Adhere to the principles contained in the FCC’s Broadband Policy Statement (FCC 05-151 adopted Aug. 5, 2005).
2. Not favor any lawful Internet applications or content over others.
3. Display network management policies in a prominent location on the service provider’s web page and provide notice to customers of changes to these policies (awardees must describe any business practices or technical mechanisms they employ, other than standard best efforts Internet delivery, to allocate capacity; differentiate among applications, providers, or sources; limit usage; and manage or block access to illegal or harmful content).
4. Connect to the public Internet directly or indirectly, such that the project is not an entirely private closed network.
5. Offer interconnection, where technically-feasible, on reasonable rates and terms to be negotiated with requesting parties. This includes both the ability to connect to the public Internet and physical interconnection for the exchange of traffic.

The second one is very specific here in the description where they say that:

This requirement ensures neutral traffic routing. Without a non-discrimination condition, network operators could give preferential treatment to affiliated services, or charge some application and content providers for “fast lanes” that would put others at a competitive disadvantage.

The document continues with text about the AT&T/Bell South merger requirements and notes that this is a more general version, allowing the carriers more room to cache, manage spam, deal with DNS attacks, etc.

Go a few more pages and on page 118 they continue with the justification:

Overall, these five requirements ensure that public funds will support the public goal of open networks. The standards chosen echo established FCC rules, but avoid detailed regulation and allow for flexibility when network management requires differential treatment or exclusivity.

The section concludes by noting that the rules apply for the life of the facilities and that failure to comply would likely be considered breach of their loan or grant agreements at which point one would assume the money would have to be repaid.

This really is great news. If the government is going to be spending our own tax dollars (stimulus funds) to improve broadband coverage across the country, then access should be equal to all for all content.

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Net Neutrality Mandated in $7.2 Billion Broadband Stimulus Funding

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From the staff, designers, authors and contributors here at Revenews to all those who served our country over the years and to those who still serve today and their families: a heartfelt thank you.

Korean War Memorial Atlantic City. Picture By Ron Miguel RN.

Originally posted here:
We Salute You

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After the first day of ad:tech I thought things were going pretty well for the industry.  Day two gave me time to make some more sessions (I live twittered them) and spend some time on the two levels of the exhibit hall.  Many booths were noticeably smaller (Google) or missing (Yahoo!), the tchotchkes were noticeably minimal if they even had them, and the parties were quite often cash bar.

Years past the trip through the show floor for goodies yielded a plethora of cool, weird, and boring items (SF2007, SF 2007, NY 2008) to tempt you to stop by the booth.  This year there were a few worthwhile things like the purple octopus, but it was moslty pens and handouts.

It looked like there were a ton of parties (eight Tuesday night that I knew of), but very few were open bar.  In the past, every party I was invited to (and as press I get invited to most) was open bar. Companies are still spending the money to get their name out there and make a splash, but they seemingly can’t afford the extra outlay for the alcohol. Not all parties were cash.  The beer was flowing freely in the Beer Grden at the Affiliate Summit Networking party Tuesday evening.

There were some positives. ad:tech added a new part of the show called ADSPACE, dedicated to “contextual advertising.” I have to put it in quotes because there were a number of sessions that lightly touched on contextual ads and got into ad serving, performance marketing, metrics, affiliate programs, etc.

One session was titled “Beyond Text Ads: In Text, Affiliate, Led-Gen, eBay and More!”  This alone shows that ad:tech is expanding and growing into a show that covers all the ways people monetize their sites.  The performance based industry was well represented and every mention I heard talked about how the ROI was superior to other channels.  There was some great discussion on tracking multiple channels and that dollars are being shifted to the channel because it is measureable and performs so well. Real issues such as fraud were brought up, but it was discussed rationally and affiliates were not painted negatively with a broad brush.

I think the addition of the new ADSPACE track and exhibit area was a great idea and will help improve ad:tech as well as the performance marketing industry as w whole.

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Unless you have been living under a rock, you are aware of California (and other) states efforts to copy New York and collect sales tax on affiliate initiated transactions. Collection of sales tax is important, and states are right to be concerned about taxes that are owed to them and not being collected.  But this is the wrong way to go about collecting this money and can easily cause more harm than good.

The California bill is Assembly Bill 178 sponsored by Assembly Member Nancy Skinner. The hearing date on Bill 178 has been scheduled for April 13, 2009.

We all learned a hard lesson in New York.  Luckily that lesson is being applied right now in California.  Action needs to be taken now while the bill is still in committee.

The PMA’s Stance

The Performance Marketing Alliance has formed a committee led by the experienced Beth Kirsch who has done lobbying at the federal level.  She has been working with a coalition led by the Chamber of Commence and the California Taxpayer’s Association that includes the big players in the Tech space. This coalition has had success with similar bills in the past. With companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay, and CJ all based here, there are a lot of big companies with vested interests that are taking actions either as part of this coalition or on their own.

The PMA is a valuable addition to this coalition because we can put a face on the issue.  We can get real people with real stories to talk about what this bill can do to them.  As such, the PMA is leading a grass-roots effort to spread the word about this to as many people in this industry as possible.  They have more in the works as well, with details coming out as they develop.  There are some more meetings today, and strategizing over the weekend.  After that, I expect to see plan laid out.

Likely there will be a need for people who can go to Sacramento, people to make appointments for in-person visits with their own representative, letter writers, and press outreach. If you can help with any of that, please contact the PMA to see how you can help.

Other Resources to Help Combat the Bill

There are other resources to check out as well. CAaffiliates.com is an ABestWeb forum for the discussion of the bill. Both Mark Welch and Scott Jangro have written excellent letter’s on the matter (Mark’s letter (pdf) and Scott’s letter) which I encourage you to read.

How Can You Help?

Discuss the bill with people. Let them know why it’s a bad idea, inform them. If you have a blog, make a post.  If you are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. use them to spread the word and link to places where this is being talked about. Create discussion and make your voice be heard.

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Affiliate Taxation – Time to Fight Back

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