Klout has been publishing lists of online influencers for some time already.

Not surprisingly, an area that hasn’t been touched so far is affiliate marketing — a field too niche for the general public, yet one of tremendous interest to those of us who are breathing and living it every day.

So, as soon as I logged into my Klout dashboard today, I was thrilled to see that I’m “one of the first users selected to preview Klout’s new topic pages” which now allow you “to see top influencers” in each “official topic”:

Naturally, the first topical page/section I went to was that on affiliate marketing!

And among “the top influencers for Affiliate Marketing in the past 90 days” we see:

1. Shawn Collins
2. Affiliate Summit
3. Missy Ward
4. Geno Prussakov (flattered to be beaten only by Shawn, Missy, and the industry’s largest conference)
5. Eric Nagel
6. Linda Buquet
7. Jim Kukral
8. Clickbooth
9. Logan Thompson
10. Google Affiliate Network

Here’s the screenshot too (note how “Top +K Recipients” [more on what +K is here] is actually not the same as “Top Influencers” which seems to encompass both +K’s and content):

On Monday, August 8, Pace Lattin of Performance Marketing Insider has drawn the industry’s attention to a lawsuit filed by Reese Richman LLP, the subject of which is “questionable and possibly illegal behavior … by hijacking search queries.” Pace wrote:

Using a technology by Paxfire, supposedly DNS redirects from searches on Bing, Yahoo and Google would lead consumers directly to the page of certain brand and credit the ISP’s affiliate account with any possible commissions. [more here]

ZDNet picked up the story and elaborated on the problem:

Paxfire proudly proclaims itself to be the “proven industry leader in monetizing Address Bar Search and DNS Error traffic for Network Operators. Through our carrier-grade technology, we generate millions of dollars a month in new advertising revenue for our partners by enabling them to participate in the booming $20 billion a year search advertising market.”

In other words, what Paxfire does is it intercepts your searches. Then, if their proxy servers find a match in their advertising databases, they’ll send you top search results from their affiliate marketing programs rather than what your search engine would give you as the best results. [source]

Apparently, the four International Computer Science Institute (Berkely, CA) researchers — whose study reveled that around a dozen of ISPs were using the technology — have put together a blog post on the subject where they’ve mentioned the major affiliate networks that were affected (Commission Junction, LinkShare, and Google Affiliate Network), as well as two tools that affiliates should find of help in spotting traffic hijacking threats:

Why do they do this?

In short, the purpose appears to be monetization of users’ searches. ICSI Networking’s investigation has revealed that Paxfire’s HTTP proxies selectively siphon search requests out of the proxied traffic flows and redirect them through one or more affiliate marketing programs, presumably resulting in commission payments to Paxfire and the ISPs involved. The affiliate programs involved include Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, and Ask.com. When looking up brand names such as “apple”, “dell”, “groupon”, and “wsj”, the affiliate programs direct the queries to the corresponding brands’ websites or to search assistance pages instead of providing the intended search engine results page.

What can I do about it?

If you want to know if the network you’re currently on is subject to this type of traffic redirection, you can run a Netalyzr test. And the best protection against the privacy and security risks created by this type of hijacking is to visit sites using HTTPS rather than HTTP, which can easily be achieved using EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension. [more here]

Yesterday (August 9) Commission Junction suspended Paxfire from the network explaining to ClickZ:

We had no knowledge of this reported activity until last week. At the time, Paxfire was in fact a publisher in the CJ network. We have taken immediate action — Paxfire has been deactivated pending further investigation, and we are continuing our investigation of this matter. [source]

Well, Paxfire is “deactivated”, but there are other similar players — and we’ve discussed this in comments under this 2009 post of mine — who cooperate with ISPs on very similar terms; and who are still active on major affiliate networks (e.g.: working with ISPs “replacing DNS and HTTP errors with relevant advertising” [source]). This has been going on for years… Of course, the problem with Paxfire is different in the fact that they also have “an optional, unadvertised, and more alarming feature that drastically expands Paxfire’s window into users’ traffic” whereby “instead of activating only upon error, this product redirects the customers’ entire web search traffic destined for Yahoo!, Bing, and sometimes Google, to a small number of separate web traffic proxies.” [more here] Either way, whether another affiliate’s cookie gets overwritten in the process or not, together with the traffic affiliate commissions get “hijacked” as well.

Meanwhile, the above-quoted class-action lawsuit (against an ISP and Paxfire itself) is already filed; and we’ll keep monitoring the situation for you.

An affiliate network that’s currently negotiating with investors has approached me asking if there’s a place where they can review mergers and especially acquisitions that have happened in the affiliate marketing world over the past few years.

Having found no such compilation anywhere, I have decided to put one together myself:

1. Apr. 2007 — Google spends $3.1 billion on DoubleClick [source: CNN.com] including Performics affiliate network, which was later rebranded into Google Affiliate Network.
2. Feb. 2008 — AOL acquires buy.at affiliate network for $125 million [source: Business Insider]
3. Sep. 2009 — GSI Commerce purchases out Pepperjam (affiliate network and OPM agency) [more at SearchEngineWatch.com]
4. Jan. 2010 — Time Inc. acquires StyleFeeder.com affiliate website [source: The Wall Street Journal | see also this post of mine on it]
5. Jun. 2010 — Adknowledge, which “earns $300 million in annual revenue” buys Hydra CPA network [sources: ClickZ; InternetRetailer.com]
6. Mar. 2010 — AOL sells buy.at, which had “annual sales of more than 40 million euros”, to Digital Window (terms of the deal not disclosed) [more here]
7. Apr. 2010 — Schaaf Consulting OPM agency acquires competitor, PartnerCentric [source: mThink.com & ReveNews]
8. Dec. 2010 — WhaleShark Media, which previously acquired Deals2Buy.com, CheapStingyBargains.com, Deals.com, CouponShare.com, and CouponSeven.com, buys RetailMeNot.com affiliate website (amount undisclosed) [source: SmartCompany.com.au]
9. Mar. 2011 — Google pays £37.7 million (over $61 million) for a UK-based BeatThatQuote.com affiliate site [source Guardian.co.uk]
10. Mar. 2011 — eBay purchases GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion [source: Mashable.com]

If I have missed an acquisition that must be mentioned here, please add it through the “Comments” function below, and I’ll make sure to add it to the above list too.

Less than a week ago in an intro to this post, I blogged how pleasing to my (and I’m sure every affiliate marketer’s) eye it is to see new developments at different affiliate networks. Now, in addition to ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and LinkShare, we have AvantLink with their February news!

Yesterday they announced their very own (and a very robust one too) WordPress plugin. So immediately I have reached out to them to get a better idea of how it works, and how bloggers can/will benefit from this launch. This is how this post was born…

The AvantLink plugin for WordPress basically allows quick and simple integration with a number of the network’s integrated Affiliate tools & scripts. Once the plugin is installed and activated, there are several things to note within your WordPress admin panel.

1. Plugin users will see a “AvantLink WP” link in the admin sidebar, under the “Settings” section. Clicking that link opens the “AvantLink WP Plugin Settings” page, which includes four tabs that allow the configuration of several functions, including a product search engine via the AvantLink API (see image below).

2. Plugin users will see an AvantLink icon in their post editor’s kitchen sink. Clicking the icon will open a dialog box that allows affiliates to select any pre-configured ad type/unit (banner, text, video, etc.), from any merchant the affiliate is active with. It will also allow affiliates to create custom tracking links to any merchant URL they choose (see the two screengrabs below)

3. Plugin users will notice several new AvantLink WP widgets in the “Appearance” area of their WordPress admin. These include

• • AvantLink Product Ad Widget – Easy integration of any AvantLink Product Ad Widget (PAW) subscription that has been configured and saved.
  • AvantLink Product Search Form – Quickly enable an on site product search engine, using data from AvantLink merchants.
  • AvantLink Related Products – Display related products from AvantLink merchants driven by custom keyword searches.

It’s important to note that once the AvantLink WP plugin is installed and activated, an Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) subscription is enabled by default on a site-wide basis. The ALE uses JavaScript to convert direct-to-merchant links to affiliate-tracking links on the fly, and within the end user’s browser. This of course can be deactivated via the settings page, if that’s preferred.

Several integrated tools and scripts from AvantLink offer unique and exclusive functionality free of charge to qualified affiliates, and now WordPress CMS affiliates can easily utilize these ad tools and subscriptions with simple, easy to configure widgets. Very nice development!

It’s great to see affiliate networks developing. Last week ShareASale launched their new merchant interface. A couple days after that Google Affiliate Network announced product APIs for affiliates. Yesterday Shawn Collins wrote about buy.at‘s new product search feature for affiliates. Today I’d like to bring to you another network-related news — LinkShare has just launched a mobile dashboard for affiliates (or “publishers” as they call them).

This morning I’ve had a chance to have a look at their new mobile dashboard. It is not an app, but an actual mobile website, which, as they themselves wrote to me, “allows LinkShare publishers to search, get, and promote links all from a mobile device” (via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr).

Here’s how it works:

1. Copy and paste a token

2. Choose an advertiser

3. Search for a product or coupons from that advertiser

4. Share via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr

Once again it’s a mobile website, and not an app. So basically you can use the same URL on different mobile devices.

There has been much talk and worry about the ‘Do Not Track’ legislation proposed by Federal Trade Commission in early December 2010, and now that Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox both have plugins/features to block certain types of third party cookies (and we also know that Internet Explorer 9 is gonna have it too) the worry has built up even more.

Over the past two days I’ve spoken with folks in nearly every major affiliate network (namely Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and AvantLink), and none of them could confirm that such brower plugins will have a negative affect on affiliate tracking. The major reason being is that the focus of the ‘Do Not Track’ proposal is actually on very particular type of tracking. Reading the original FTC’s proposal we see that they are looking to establish “a uniform choice mechanism for online behavioral advertising” which would make the practice of personalized behavioral advertising visible and transparent to consumers who are being tracked to be served “targeted advertisements” (pp. 12-13). With this in mind, they propose that consumers should be able to “control the collection and use of their online browsing data”, considered specifically in light of “targeted advertisements” and “behavioral advertising” (p. 14) [underlining mine]. Page 16 continues:

…the Commission supports a more uniform and comprehensive consumer choice mechanism for online behavioral advertising, sometimes referred to as “Do Not Track.” The most practical method of providing uniform choice for online behavioral advertising would likely involve placing a setting similar to a persistent cookie on a consumer’s browser, and conveying that setting to sites that the browser visits, to signal whether or not the consumer wants to be tracked or receive targeted advertisements. [again, emphasis added by me]

In discussing Firefox’s newest “Do Not Track” plugin AvantLink‘s CTO David Clark has confirmed to me that it should not affect their tracking in any way. The focus of the mechanism is just different. It is not affiliate cookies that they’re concerned with, but the behavioral targeting type tracking; and while some affiliate networks do set behavioral type cookies, affiliate tracking isn’t tied to them.

In December of 2010 Lucas Brown of HasOffers wrote:

I don’t think the FTC is really targeting the affiliate marketing industry specifically.  Rather, they are interested in preventing those that control some of the largest distribution channels from mining data and selling it as behavioral user data… The FTC is really more concerned about the abuse of behavioral advertising…

Today an affiliate marketing industry’s veteran, one of the original founders of Commission Junction, and a co-founder of Impact Radius, Todd Crawford told me:

Personally, I am confident that performance advertising will not be impacted by this type of legislation because the companies doing the tracking can limit the data they capture to ensure that they are in compliance.

What do you think?

Coincidentally or not, but 3 of the 6 major US affiliate networks — and here I imply Commission Junction, LinkShare, buy.at, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and AvantLink — announced holiday deals and offers of their merchants on November 17, 2010. These are:

LinkShare affiliate network (in a blog post):

ShareASale affiliate network (internally through affiliate interface):
[Edit of 1:14 pm: ShareASale has just announced it in a blog post too]

and AvantLink affiliate network (in a blog post):

I haven’t seen Commission Junction announce anything like this. Neither have buy.at or Google Affiliate Network blogged about  anything similar. If they have, and I’ve missed it, please correct me. I know that individual merchants have been sending out notifications of their deals via email, but I haven’t seen those deals bring aggregated anywhere in one place on the latter three networks.

———————————

Edit of 11/20/2010: Commission Junction has just added a visible link to their Holiday Success Center (seen by every affiliate upon logging into their account now):

———————————

Edit of 11/22/2010: buy.at has also just posted a blog entry with Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals available at its merchants:

In the manner of my recent experiment with LinkShare premium advertisers, today I have conducted a similar test with the top affiliate programs on Google Affiliate Network.

Having sorted advertisers by “Payout Rank”, I have applied to 100 4-bar ones (since each bar “represents one quarter of the advertisers payout to the network”, these would be the ones in the 76th to 100th percentile):

My applications resulted in 12 auto-approvals, zero automatic declines (Google Affiliate Network doesn’t show you these results right away, so I had to wait for email replies which came immediately following the online application), and the majority of my applications went into a “pending review” status. Therefore, the breakdown that I have registered with the top Google Affiliate Network advertisers looks as follows:

• automatic approvals – 12%
• manual mode – 88%

A truly pleasant surprise was to see zero automatic declines. The number of automatic approvals is also fairly low, and this is good too. No, don’t get me wrong: most affiliates will love your automatic approvals. After all, they can then start promoting you right away. However, the vast majority of affiliates won’t mind waiting for a manual review/approval either. And the latter is always better for the health of your affiliate program.

Todd Farmer had just relaunched his AffPlan with a new Affiliate Strategies session:

Good to see the good project being reborn. I still remember greeting their very first podcast a year and 29 days ago.

I’ve just noticed that the AffPlan.com website profiles the top 4 US affiliate networks, listing some interesting information about each:

This info combined with data on their fees, makes a very interesting compilation of information.

Earlier this week, while listening to David Szetela’s and Brad Geddes’ How Adwords will be Affected by Google Instant podcast I’ve learned about a cool tool which lets you compare Google Suggest results — Web Seer. As we know, it is precisely Google Suggest (with its autocomplete function) that is at the core of Google Instant‘s idea. So, it was good to learn about this tool from Brad’s talk with David.

Today I’ve played a bit with it, and here are just a few of the interesting visualizations (of what people search for) I’ve been able to retrieve:

Affiliate M…

Affiliate Marketing vs Affiliate Management

Affiliate Program vs Affiliate Network

Commission Junction vs LinkShare

Google Affiliate Network vs ShareASale

Some of the above results are interesting, others — logical, and some — rather surprising. But I’ve refrained from highlighting any, and will let you make your own conclusions. Either way, this is a very good tool to have access to.