Microsoft and Yahoo explored ways to work together in late 2006 and early 2007, but Yahoo rejected the idea of being taken over.
Yahoo’s stock has been troubled since 2000, dropping more than 80% from it’s high of 101.81. Yahoo’s most recent high was 33.36 in October of 2007. At $31 per share, Microsoft’s tender offer is clearly attempting to take advantage of Yahoo’s recent tough times and the current stock market uncertainties.
This year at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, they have decided to create a Super Affiliate Auction to support the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation, a non-profit organization helping seriously ill children and their families cope with their pain, fear and isolation through entertainment, education and family activities.
Eight of the most eligible super affiliates will be up for grabs during Affiliate Summit’s First Annual Super Affiliate Auction to benefit the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation.
Merchants, affiliate networks, CPA networks, technology providers and more will bid for the opportunity to meet and dine with one or more elite, hand-picked super affiliates to discuss affiliate marketing during Affiliate Summit 2008 West.
I am honored to be on their list of eight and to participate for such a good cause. So if your going to be in Vegas, and have always wanted to dine with a Wiseaff, bid away.
This might be a bit off topic from our usual affiliate marketing news, but I couldn’t resist posting this. I came across this advertisement in Fortune Magazine for Unico. I guess they do facilities management, but I thought this was an interesting choice of pictures… Do you see what I see? Maybe this should have been a viagra ad!
I received an email from Yahoo Search Marketing today, it starts out like this:
The purpose of this e-mail is to inform you about the savings you have received for your account(s) due to Pricing Discounts.
So far so good, sounds like I got some money back! The email goes on to explain that pricing discounts are designed to take quality into account in pricing traffic from their partner sites (their content network), and that that we were charged less for some clicks based on this quality indicator. Next the email explains that I have savings and there is an attached spreadsheet detailing those savings. Cool!
The email further says:
Next Steps
We would like to discuss potential opportunities for reinvesting savings you have received as a result of Pricing Discounts, including:
Expanding keyword coverage.
Increasing bids on keywords that are impacted by Pricing Discounts.
Increasing bid on keywords that were otherwise unaffordable.
Adopting new tactics and channels (Advanced Match, Feeds Products).
Please contact your Platinum representative Sothea Keo at sotheak@yahoo-inc.com to answer any questions you may have and to schedule a time to discuss your Pricing Discounts.
All sounds good until I open up the spreadsheet!
Week of:
Client Name
Account Name
Discount
12/02-12/08/07
imwave, inc.
imwave (halloween)
$2.59
Whoopee! I have saved $2.59 in quality discounts. I think I will be reinvesting ALL MY SAVINGS in stamps this year! I can send out 5 holiday cards for that!
We received a note today informing us that Commission Junction has decided to shut down their own affiliate program. Many affiliate networks have affiliate programs that pay for new advertisers and publishers to the network. Not CJ anymore, I guess I will have to remove their banner from Wiseaff.com!
Here is their note:
Dear CJRP Publisher,
The Commission Junction Recruiter Program has surpassed the goals set at the start of the program. We would like to thank you for being a part of the Recruiter Program. The business needs for the Recruiter Program have changed, and the decision has been made to close the account. The account is targeted to be closed December 14, 2007, with all publishers set to be expired on December 12, 2007 and final leads batched in prior to closure on the 14th.
Commission Junction wishes you much success in your future endeavors with your publisher account at Commission Junction.
Thank you,
CJFP Program Manager
Commission Junction
So the program has surpassed it’s goals and is being shut down? Is this the same kind of advice they give their advertisers. "Hey, your program is doing great, better than anyone expected, time to shut it down!"
Not only does the cobbler’s kids have no shoes, they are actually burning the ones they had!
Wrong message, wrong decision. Sorry CJ, we still love you…
We are traveling up to Rhode Island this year for the holidays, and Sara and I had discussed the various presents we were going to buy for our children and parents. I found ALL the items I was looking for at Amazon, and everything was "in stock". I put all the items in my shopping cart (well over $1,000) and then re-confirmed the list with Sara. The idea was to pay for gift wrapping and ship everything to our destination to make traveling easier. We were willing to pay for convenience.
Great! So here we were, it wasn’t even Dec 1st yet, and we had 80-90% of our gift list done and ready to order, so I started the checkout process.
Guess what? Even though everything was in-stock, Amazon was telling me that 80% of the items wouldn’t be able to be shipped to Rhode Island by Christmas (4 weeks away!). I thought maybe they were trying to up-sell the more expensive shipping options, but even with 1 & 2 Day shipping only about 50% of the items would make it by Christmas. I wonder what "in-stock" means to Amazon.
So much for one-stop shopping and convenience, I spent an extra 2-3 hours of my life, found all the items at other stores and had them gift-wrapped and shipped.
It’s been a great year, and I want to wish all of our wiseaff readers a very happy thanksgiving and a safe, healthy, and profitable holiday season!!!
I always like to see the interesting holiday logos that the search engines come up with each year. This year ASK.com takes the award for the biggest thanksgiving theme, and Microsoft again takes the turkey award for the lack of any holiday cheer. Take a look:
I was reading Time magazine this morning, and noticed that Scott Jangro’s CostumeZee site got a nice mention in the Hurricane Hannah article and a nice on-line link as well from Time.com!
"You can’t even escape Hannah on a dark street; according to CostumZee.com she’s the most popular costume this Halloween."
It’s great to see one of our own break into the mainstream media! Congratulations Scott, well done!
Affiliates spend a lot of time trying to understand Google’s search results, no matter if you have a site you are trying to build rankings for or if you are a paid search publisher like my self bidding on millions of keywords every day.
Today I ran across some internal screen shots originally posted by Zorgblob (English translated page) and further reported by Vallywag. This is what internal googlers see when they are looking at search results:
So what do these internal fields mean? There has been some speculation about the Adv (Yes | No) field. Vallywag seems to think it might be an internal tool for sales reps to identify and recruit advertisers. I find that highly unlikely. There have been some rumors and speculation in the past about if buying advertising helps your internal search rankings. I have noticed in the past for a friend I was doing search for that before we started his PPC campaign he was showing up as a top local listing for his area hotel, when the PPC started and he got a top PPC listing for his paid ads, these local “on results” listings disappeared. The only thing we could attribute that to was his paid listings.
Google has always said that they are very concerned about the quality of their search results, and don’t want one site taking up a majority of the space, my guess is this field helps with that.
I do find it interesting that they appear to be placing some kind of monetary value on the organic listings with the GG Score. I wonder if they look at how much each page of SERPs make and try to balance quality results (getting people to the right information) vs profit per page from ads. I would think that optimizing both would be important for their business.
I also find it very interesting that they are trying to place each ad into a vertical market, almost directory style. Maybe that is how they build the Google Directory (http://directory.google.com/).
People seem to think the PVs field stands for Page Views, I wonder if that is calculating times that listing has been viewed in Google across keyword terms, or times the site has been clicked on?
I think it’s odd that the lower ad in the screen shot has lower scores across the board, so these don’t appear to be fields that Google is sorting the search results on.
What do you think of these internal numbers? Have you heard anything more?
I’d like to make a special shout out to Karen White, one of my favorite affiliate managers. I first met Karen White when she was the affiliate manager for the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. I had gotten wind of their first affiliate Fam tour and blogged about what a great incentive it was. At the next affiliate summit, Karen introduced herself, invited me to the next fam tour and gave me a Wynn gift card. I just couldn’t resit working with her.
We grew a very profitable campaign with her at the Wynn, and had a great time at the Fam tour. Our sales for the Wynn the quarter after the Fam tour were $237k. So their hospitality really paid off, we had done $20k the quarter before.
Unfortunately the Wynn let Karen go shortly after the fam tour, with her went the relationship, and after what we consider to be some bad policy decisions, our sales for the Wynn have dropped off significantly.
But, we continue to have a great relationship with Karen and we are anxiously awaiting her next program with Partner Fusion.
I ran into Karen at CJU, and mentioned that my wife and 3 of her high school friends were coming out to Vegas for the weekend, and she totally hooked them up with tickets to the blue man group! Sara and her friends arrived only to find out they were on the VIP list. They got the first class treatment and got to go back stage afterwords and meet some of the performers, wow!
It’s going out of your way to do something so nice like this that totally cements a relationship, we would work with Karen wherever she went.
This is why we are announcing Karen White as our first Wiseaff of the Month!
Congratulations Karen, and thanks for making my wife’s Vegas weekend so special. What happens in Vegas, gets blogged here baby! You rock!
