I am not sure if you missed some of the back and forth between Larry Adams of Performics and Kris Jones of Pepperjam over the title of Larry Adam’s Blog Post: “Publishers Spoke, We Listened“.  Apparently Kris felt the blog title was a little to similar to their “Affiliates have Spoken. Pepperjam Listened” marketing campaign they have been using.  Here is a copy of the back of the shirt I got at Affiliate Summit:

In the comments of this Revenews blog post, Kris went as far as to suggest the following:

“Larry – we applied for the trademark “Affiliates Have Spoken. Pepperjam Listened.”

An Larry pointed out the following:

“I was at the Summit, although I can’t say that I remember any of your t-shirts; Vegas can be a distracting place. I’m not saying I never saw it but let’s just say that neither of us are going to get a trademark on the “[You] spoke, [we] listened” motto – http://tinyurl.com/yom86a“

All probably a little silly if you ask me, and when I put my Pepperjam T-shirt on this morning, It did all come back to me, and I thought it was odd, and interesting to note, that their TM mark on the T-shirt isn’t actually on the phrase, it’s on the Pepperjam term only.

Back to your regularly scheduled program…

Yesterday, Kowabunga! released a press release detailing their $20 in new debt funding from Wachovia Bank.

Jody Brown, chief financial officer of Kowabunga!, stated, “The new credit facilities with Wachovia provide us greater financial flexibility at attractive borrowing rates. It will allow us to continue to maintain a strong balance sheet, while providing the company an additional source of capital for general corporate purposes.”

Scott P. Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of Kowabunga!, added, “We are very pleased to continue our long term banking relationship with Wachovia and consider these extended and more flexible credit facilities a strong vote of confidence for what we are building here at Kowabunga!. Access to capital on more flexible terms will enhance our ability to continue on the path of growth, particularly in our Ad Network business, which grew approximately 65% in the fourth quarter of 2007 over the same period 2006.”

Forgive me for a mini rant here.  I have been dealing with affiliate marketing since 1996, when Amazon started their affiliate program and I owned an ISP called Cyberia in York PA. (Links: Cyberia 1996 | Tony’s Archived Site 1998)

So, Affiliate Marketing has been around for a while now.  Why is it that the only network I have seen that is able to show me an invalid click report is Commission Junction?

How hard is it to track the links that come through the network that not working because of dead links, inactive merchants, or disabled programs?

This is invaluable information folks!

When I log in to CJ today, it shows 6 invalid clicks, and I can tell that Earthlink (oddly enough the company who ultimately acquired Cyberia through a series of acquisitions) is no longer an active merchant on CJ and I have an old outdated link getting clicks on my Great-ISP-Deals.com site.

Now I can take action to either remove them from my site, or figure out if they moved their program somewhere else.

In the past CJ used to link those bad links to a "No longer active page", but appears to now pass the old expired link and traffic on to the merchant without compensation.  I am not so sure how I fell about that personally.  It makes it harder for me to identify bad links when I click on them, but can understand it’s a better user experience.

Honestly, I think that if they are not going to pay us for the traffic, than it should be up to the affiliate how this invalid traffic is passed, it might be nice to actually let us define a url where the traffic goes so we can track it and monetize it, after all it’s OUR TRAFFIC, not theirs.

What do the rest of you think?

1. All networks should have an invalid click report, and show this number of invalid clicks on the login screen or via a daily email.
2. Networks should not pass non-monetizing outdated links on to the merchant for free, they should let the affiliates define a URL where we would like this traffic sent so it can be monetized and tracked.