Dreamforce 2006 Day 1

I'm in San Francisco for Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference, just a few minutes away from the opening remarks this morning. Not too much happened last night at the opening reception, there were a few demos and sneak previews of upcoming functionality but nothing we haven't already seen on the Idea Exchange. A few things to note:

1. 150+ total upgrades
   
2. Alerts and reminders will be incorporated - long overdue and much welcomed
3. New calendars
4. "in-line S controls" - while I don't fully understand this, what I gather is that we can incorporate outside functionality within Salesforce, which could be huge.
5. Ajax galore - I'd have about $50 in my pocket if I had a dollar for everytime someone mentioned Ajax within the 30 minutes I saw demos. I don't need to know programming to know from the demos why this will be good for me - slicker functionality and greater flexibility is clearly coming our way
6. Widgets - have I ever mentioned how much I dislike this word? Anyway, widgets are here to stay.

A couple of new pictures from day one:

Wanna Buy an Affiliate Network?

Better hurry, only 4 hours left although there don't seem to be any bidders yet.



NetTraction acknowledges the fact that this is a money losing operation, but gives you plenty of ideas on how to monetize the network including:

Revenue

Although the network is currently a free network, meaning it costs a merchant nothing to become an advertiser , NetTraction has already monetized the network by upselling to the merchant base. Therefore, any revenue already generated from the network was NetTraction revenue and not AffiliateTraction.NET revenue. This is why we cannot show past revenue numbers in this listing. HOWEVER, for future revenue opportunities please see below.

Revenue Opportunities

The AffiliateTraction.NET Free Network can be successfully monetized several different ways:

• Sell advertising on/in the site (as seen here)
• Charge insertion fees
• Charge monthly fees
• Charge commissions
• Offer AffiliateTraction software through exclusive agreement
• Sell Merchant/Publisher leads to NetTraction

I'm curious what the full asking price is, since the opening bid is $24,999.00 and there is a reserve on top of that. Basically it seems that you are buying their DirectTrack network license along with some merchant and affiliate contact info.

Any takers?

CJU - a Preview

For me there are 2 can't miss conferences for the affiliate world - Affiliate Summit and Commission Junction University (CJU). This year's CJU is only 2 weeks away, running from 9/17 - 9/19 in Santa Barbara. This will be the 5th consecutive CJU I've attended, and every one has been an extremely well run and rewarding event. I'm anticipating a good event and I have a strong feeling that this year's CJU will be interesting and different in a few ways:

1. The departure of several key CJ employees. Jeff Pullen, Todd Crawford, Lisa Riolo, Elizabeth Cholawsky, and several other of the most tenured and respected people have left CJ in the past year. I am anxious to meet the new leaders of CJ and what their roadmap for the future is.

2. LMI (Link Management Initiative). I'm shocked that this issue is not being addressed through any topic on the current agenda, but I have no doubt that the audience will make this a hot topic. Even though CJ backed down from forcing this change on everyone, LMI was the the most contriversial affiliate issue we've seen in years. Shouldn't CJ be demonstrating all the reasons they wanted LMI and give affiliates the forum to voice their concerns?

3. The BeFree chopping block. This year Valueclick made the first moves towards forcing the BFAST platform into extinction by not renewing BeFree contracts and forcing merchants to move to the CJ platform when they expired. Most noteably, companies like The Gap, Brooks Brothers and Dicks Sporting Goods have all switched to Linkshare.

The real power of this event for me is in the networking and meeting with the people we do business with on a daily basis. Because our industry is spread across the globe, we only get a few chances a year to sit down and meet with our key partners face to face. Santa Barbara couldn't offer a more perfect setting, and NETexponent will be bringing 3 people besides myself to represent our clients.

Planning on going and want to meet? drop me a line at Chris at NETexponent.com.

Why Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity Will Become Extinct

There is a new bread of travel sites cropping up that pose a serious threat to the current leaders in the online travel space. Sites like Sidestep and Kayak are significantly different than the "old school" travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity in that you do your price search through their site, but book directly with the airline or hotel.

With more and more airlines and hotels guaranteeing the lowest rates when booking directly, consumers will gradually become savvy enough to realize that there is little reason to book through an aggregator like Expedia. According to a recent report by HitWise, the market share of visits to travel meta-search engines Kayak and Yahoo! FareChase increased by over 70% from May 2005 to May 2006.

Further diminishing the value of the aggregators, many airlines such as Continental and hotels including Hilton, Starwood, and Marriott go beyond just the best rate guarantees and offer perks such as upgrades or bonus loyalty points for booking directly. If you read through TripAdvisor, you'll also find countless tales of people who booked through sites like Expedia only to find they had problems once they arrived because they did not book direct.

There is also a pretty revolutionary new site still in beta called FareCast.com that tracks average airfare prices between major cities and advises you on the best time to purchase based on recent trends. Sites like this give the consumer so much more buying power than they have ever had before.

The one area that companies like Orbitz and Expedia can fight back is in packages. A recent search for airfare + hotel for an October trip to San Francisco if booked directly through Marriott and United Airlines would have cost me about $1250, while a package booked through Expedia would have only cost $775, a savings of 38%. I tested several other travel scenarios and found nearly all of the packages to be considerably cheaper than buying direct.

The late 90's saw the virtual extinction of offline travel agents when people discovered online travel booking, and I think it will only take 3-5 more years before sites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity also border on extinction.

Google Reverses Censorship Decision

Thanks to Wayne Porter for keeping us up to date on the situation with Steve Rosenbaum and his Google campaign. We have a winner folks, and it appears Google has changed their mind and decided to let Steve's campaign run. From Steve's Blog, Google's "resolution":

adwords-support@google.com

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your email. I've confirmed that your ad is approved and running on Google.

Our AdWords Specialists review ads that run on Google to ensure that they comply with our advertising policies. I apologize if the prior disapproval of your ad was made in error. However, after reviewing your ad again, our Specialists have found that your ad meets all our Editorial Guidelines and advertising policies.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support to find answers to many frequently asked questions. Or, try our Learning Center at http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/ for self-paced lessons that cover the scope of AdWords.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Lizzie
The Google AdWords Team

While this is a victory, it does feel a little tainted since Google just sent out this canned response rather than having a real person address the freedom of speech issue head on. I'd like to think that all of the attention that Wayne and the community gave this topic really made a difference but unfortunately we may never know. If anyone is friends with "Lizzie", please have her give me a call, I'd love to ask her a few questions...

Google Censors War Coverage

A week or so ago I was standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts and was captivated by what I saw on the TV up on the wall. CNN was showing a video from YouTube that was shot by a college student in Lebanon depicting how she escaped the country to safety. While amateur video has been part of news coverage for years, the fact that the "source" was YouTube reminded me that the internet continues to play a vital role in the information we consume. I considered writing a post about the power of user generated content but never quite got around to it.

Today I was surprised and disappointed to learn that respected Producer, Directer and blogger Steve Rosenbaum was being censored by Google. Wayne Porter does an excellent job of digging into the issue, and I urge you to also read Steve's original post here:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/steve.rosenbaum/archives/010952.html

To summarize, Mr. Rosenbaum created a useful site that collected various user shot videos of the Middle-East conflict and built an Adwords campaign to spread the word. What happened was that Google not only rejected the ads but deleted the entire campaign from his account.

The offending ads:

==================

Israel/Lebanon War Video
See real video. Post Your Own
Comments and Opinions.
Warzone-video.magnify.net
==================

Israel War Video
User-Generated Video from the
Front Lines. Uncensored.
Warzone-video.magnify.net

==================

Hezbollah War Video
Uncensored User-Generated Video
from the Front Lines.
Warzone-video.magnify.net

==================

Lebanese War Video
Uncensored User-Generated Video
from the Front Lines.
Warzone-video.magnify.net

==================

The explanation from Google:

SUGGESTIONS:-> Content: Due to the sensitive nature of this matter, we are not able to run this ad at this time. As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.

POLICY DEFINITIONS:
Unacceptable Content: Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web without censoring search results. Please note that the decisions we make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we deliver. Please note that both your ad and keywords have been suspended at this time.

I have several issues with this. Obviously we know the war is a "sensitive issue" but does that mean that we're supposed to ignore it and pretend that it isn't going on? Where exactly does Google draw the line on what topics are acceptable and which are not? I understand Google has the right to reject whatever ads they want but should they? Google doesn't seem to have much of a problem showing ads for the term "sex video", but "war video" shows 0 paid results?

Mr. Porter sums it up best:

To Google: Perhaps you mean well, but the user, many of us are intelligent ones, can decide on the sensitive nature of world matters. Afterall we are your customers. We drive your business. We rely on you for relevant information in both advertising and search. In this case it was a needed civic experiment.

AOL Apologizes for "Screw Up"

AOL has apologized for their obvious mistake of releasing search history on more than 600k users. The offending file along with the rest of the page on AOL's research center has since been taken down but not before thousands of people had the opportunity to download the data.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman said. "It was an innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."

An ugly and embarrassing day for AOL, but hopefully they will learn just how important privacy is and ensure that nothing like this can happen again.

AOL Releases Search History for 650k Users

Just when you thought AOL was making some smart moves by no longer charging broadband users to access AOL services, a blunder of biblical proportions has come out of the AOL camp.

For some reason, AOL thought it would be a good idea to release data on 20 million search queries over the past 3 months from 650k users. While they contend this is "annonomys" data, there are obvious fears that people can connect an actual user to this data. One user commented:

12:09 by lando?: Hmm, i find it fascinating that user 545605's searches are "shore hills park mays landing nj", "frank william sindoni md", "ceramic ashtrays", "transfer money to china", and "capital gains on sale of house". I wonder how Mr. Frank William in Sindoni, Maryland will feel about being included in your publicized data.

The research along with user comments and the actual data file can be found here:

http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months

Every search users assumes their personal information will never be shared with anyone - this is a serious breach of privacy and it is things like this that give our industry a black eye. The file has already been downloaded by 1k users and there is no telling how dangerous this can be in the wrong hands.



Trackback: TechCrunch

Google to reveal click fraud data

Google announced this morning on their adwords blog that they will now be revealing click fraud data to advertisers.



The functionality is a bit buried in the reports section, but its there nevertheless. One quick downside I see already is that this data is only available at the campaign level, not the adgroup or keyword level. A quick check on a couple of our campaigns shows Google reporting click fraud at less than 5%. While this is a great step, Google still needs to give advertisers better tools for identifying fraudulent clicks and garbage traffic. At NETexponent we rely on a combination of 3rd party tools and reports that help us identify keywords, countries, and content distribution partners that may be sending unprofitable traffic. While the engines may not deem them "fraudulent", by eliminating wastage we're able to continually reduce costs and re-allocate dollars back into the best keywords.

I'm sure there will be a flurry of blogging on this subject in the coming hours and days, stay tuned...

Google Being Evil Again?

I recently posted about Google Lab's questionable product called Web Accelerator, and it seems that there may be some other skeletons lurking in the closet. When reviewing some referring URL logs for a Google campaign, I came across many URLs with the prefix http://apps5.oingo.com which I found especially curious since I know we had previously added that domain to our blocked list on content distribution due to poor results. After doing some research I came across this interesting post:

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6110 - included is a response from Google when questioned about Oingo:

I understand that you're concerned that your ads may be appearing on [Google-owned-parking service].com even though you've added this URL to the site exclusion tool. [Google-owned-parking service].com is part of the Adsense for Domains networks and although most of these sites may be excluded with the site exclusion tool there are some exceptions that may not. This is due to the fact that some of these sites are of a hybrid type and are considered both part of the search and the content network. Oingo is one of these exceptions. To learn about the difference between the search and the content network please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6119&hl=en.

To effectively filter your ads from this site you may want to consider opting certain campaigns out of the search network.

If you opt out of the search network, your ad will no longer appear on your unwanted site, nor will it appear on any other site in the search network. However, opting out of the search network may significantly reduce your ad coverage and visibility to prospects.

I have known for some time that Google has owned this company and that it involved parked domains, but it just hit me as to just how serious a conflict of interest we have here folks. The fact that they consider traffic from these domains to be "search" means that we not only pay the search rate for this traffic, but that we also can't opt out of traffic from these sites unless we drop the entire search network which include AOL and Ask.com.

The other aspect of this that is really compelling is that Google is now penalizing sites for having "thin" content by incorporating a landing page quality score into PPC campaigns. So on one side you have sites penalized for lack of real content, yet Google is rewarding these same sites by giving them a cut of the search revenue and by preventing advertisers from eliminating these sites from their campaigns.

Some examples of actual domains I found:
www.barnesnolbe.com
www.harrypotterfans.net
www.nickolouden.com
www.schoutcast.com
www.shoutast.com
www.thedavinchicode.com
http://www.youtvbe.com/

Thanks to Steve and Vinny for sparking the discussion during the last Affiliate Summit.