Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction Blog

Customer ratings & reviews company [or, let’s say, word of mouth marketing facilitator], Bazaarvoice has entered the UK market, reported Netimperative.

What interests me most about this company is that it combines two powerful and increasingly popular phenomena: user generated content and pay-for-performance marketing. With viral/ word-of-mouth marketing having become such an important (and in many cases, indispensable component) of today’s marketing, services such as Bazaarvoice play an important role in the way marketers reach out to their target audiences. The company’s SyndicateVoice distributes ratings and reviews on advertisers to various portals (its distribution partners); the publishers get “free” content while Bazaarvoice charges advertisers on a CPA model for successful transactions.

Currently, the company’s client base (advertisers) does not seem to be very large to make a huge impact to the lives of affiliate marketers; however, I see quite a bit of synergies and potential. As affiliates, we are always hungry for content that can help sell products of the merchants we promote; and what better than have lots of favorable (but genuine) customer ratings and reviews?

The large networks are probably in the best possible position to work out a model that integrates content/ services offered by Bazaarvoice (or another suitable provider), which works for affiliate publishers as well.

Buy.at, among the major affiliate marketing networks in the UK, is launching in the US. As part of their effort to create awareness about themselves across the Atlantic, they have started a forum on ABestWeb, an affiliate marketing forum in the US. Initially, buy.at is launching with one program, CD Now and will be using Andy Rodriguez Consulting. More details about their US sojourn here.

After all the activity surrounding TradeDoubler a couple of months ago, this move by Buy.at marks another move by a European player to the US market. As more of these players get a foothold in the US, competition will certainly heat up for dominant players like CJ and Linkshare.

From an affiliate’s perspective, I think the direct benefits of competition or entry of more players in the market (commission revenues) materialise only when they are able to significantly expand the merchant base (which is what we would expect and hope for). Of course, affiliates could also benefit with improved tools/ features and probably even better customer service. Overall, I think advertisers stand to gain the most with more high-quality networks in the fray.

AdECN, a non-profit consortium of online ad networks, is slated to launch in the UK shortly. The UK currently has over 40 online ad networks– which reportedly generated revenues of 120 million GBP in 2006. Ten of these networks have already signed up to participate in AdECN.

The key differentiator between this ‘network’ and the other advertising networks (eg. AdBrite) is that it does not involve advertisers and publishers directly, but is dependent on the participation of the ad networks to get its pool of ad inventory and advertisers. The system operates on an auction model where the ad networks provide the publisher ad inventory details and a real-time auction takes place for each ad impression when a visitor lands on a page.

The CEO of AdECN explains more details of the concept, which he likens to that of a stock exchange in operation, in an interview with e-consultancy.

Online advertising is evolving rapidly, with all the new options opening up (market expected to cross $80 billion by 2011, according to Piper Jaffray) , and ad networks have an ever growing role to play to support the growth and reach of online advertising. Consequently, I reckon we may see some more of these ad marketplaces that will be the bidding ground for the different ad networks.
Pay-for-performance marketers, who already work with many of the ad networks that operate affiliate marketing programs, may find this an opportunity to monetize some of the space on their sites without risking their core revenue stream [which they could when running something like AdSense or other CPC ad syndication programs on their sites]. Whether the incremental revenue opportunity from this kind of display advertising will be attractive enough to hard core pay-for-performance marketers remains to be seen.