Category Archives: affiliate marketing

Jason Calacanis Affiliate Summit Keynote Video

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Jason Calacanis delivered a great keynote to kick-off Affiliate Summit West ’08 back in February. If you are in the content business on the Internet, you should watch this:

Are affiliate marketers polluting the river? Some certainly are, and hopefully this keynote inspired a few of the guilty to conduct some thoughtful introspection.

I think Calacanis’ death-of-Usenet analogy is particularly interesting. However, I also think Google will continue to wage its war against spam, and I don’t envision the spammers winning it out.

What are your thoughts?

Link Disclosure

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First, let me say the primary purpose of this blog is not to make money… it’s to share my personal thoughts and insights on numerous topics (primarily technology, politics, and American culture), and to hopefully spur some thoughtful discourse in return. For this reason, the blog as a whole can appear very disjointed, and I doubt that a very large body of readers would accumulate. If I was in this to make serious money, I’d stick to a single topic.

Nevertheless, I do include advertising on Politivi for several reasons:

  1. It’s my job to stay current on Internet advertising and marketing trends. I work in affiliate marketing, so it is important that I stay ahead of the game. This blog (and other sites I have), allows me to be an engaged user of my own team’s product, as well as the web advertising solutions that other firms offer.
  2. Advertising helps offset the hosting costs.
  3. It’s fun to make a few pennies off of my work.

In addition to the normal sponsored ads/links that are clearly labeled, the content of this blog will sometimes include unmarked affiliate links (within a post’s body, as well as other places) to sites like Shopzilla, BizRate, Amazon, et al. The reasons for doing this are congruent with the reasons enumerated above. Beyond this, it’s just annoying to point out each time such a link occurs (plus you can usually see in the browser’s status bar if such a link is affiliate-encoded).

To be clear, none of the opinions expressed on this site are influenced by any advertisers. I take full responsibility for the nonsense expressed herein.

Google Slapped Your Face?

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Wired is reporting on the recent AdWords CPC increases that have taken a toll on arbitragers and others. The argument in favor of these increases is that it allows Google to display fewer (but more relevant) ads, thus increasing the CTR.  On the flip side, some ad buyers are saying that it simply costs more now and the traffic isn’t converting to compensate for the difference.

I am curious if this increase also took effect across Google’s AdSense network?