Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction Blog

It’s a season of big name mergers & acquisitions in the online advertising space. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and WPP have all been out on a shopping spree shelling out serious money in the past couple of months . What’s more, the mother of all mergers [Microsoft & Yahoo] is waiting to happen, if all the rumors are any indication [of course, the wait has now gone on for more than a year].

Compared to the multi-billion dollar deals that have happened recently, Zanox’s acquisition by Axel Springer and PubliGroupe seem to a much smaller deal at €214.9 million (plus some performance-based payments). The acquisition will result in the formation of 2 companies that will operate the zanox brand. While the deal looks like an an all European affair, the intent (as expressed by the management board of Zanox) is to grow internationally.The punchline, stated by all three of those board members in a video release, is ‘monetize the Internet’.

However, the attention will invariably shift to ValueClick/ CommissionJunction– the spotlight has been on ValueClick for more than a year already, but it has been overlooked thus far. The moot question is: even if it is ready to be acquired, which major online media player (of course it doesn’t have to be one) will it be?

A couple of weeks ago, Google Checkout made its anticipated launch in the UK. A good discussion thread evaluating the pros and cons of this to merchants, affiliate networks and affiliates is here. From an affiliate perspective, as long as there aren’t any issues with their affiliate tracking ids being incorporated, it shouldn’t impact them negatively. Having said that, I don’t find any reason to get overly excited by the news either, as I haven’t really heard much about Google Checkout contributing to a direct increase in sales for merchants. Many of Google’s offerings have taken considerable time to mature- so we’ll have to wait and watch how this one pans out.

In an unrelated news, Yell.com, has introduced an affiliate program. From what has been described in their press release, the affiliate program still seems to be a work in progress. It looks very much like Google’s “AdSense for Search” program— affiliate publishers place the Yell.com branded search boxes on their websites and get credit for users submitting search queries, which are displayed on Yell.com (of course, they do mention that there are other custom / tailor-made programmes available). The main difference is the option for a fixed monthly fee offered to publishers (like traditional online advertising) instead of just an action-based rewards program (like typical affiliate programs). It’s good to see different models emerging/ raising its head every now then and stir the affiliate marketing pot.

Another trend I expect to see now is a change in the format used for creatives —- I’d have expected to see audio/video in the creative mix. There are some interesting developments happening in this area, but more of it later. However, even if merchants/ networks haven’t gotten used to incorporating these formats in their creative mix, there is nothing stopping affiliates from using those..