“Affiliate marketing programs are commonly used by large and small companies as a low-risk means of obtaining new customers. However, some affiliate marketers have been plaguing search engine marketers for years....

When your ad is competing against an affiliate ad, the one with the higher quality score wins, so a bidding war begins for visibility. As a result, costs per click increase and the advertiser is the loser....

Do not be afraid of affiliate programs. Enact an Affiliate Rules of Engagement that prohibits using paid search as a channel.”

Janel Landis
SendTec Inc.

“Virgin real-time data + arbitrage identification algorithms + understanding investor flaws + algorithms to target mental flaws + direct and indirect market influence = $

As I see it, competitive forces between traditional publishers, market saturation from the bottom, and market influence from the likes of data hoarding companies like Google are going to quickly commoditize anything that is sold as information. To survive you need emotional touch-points that consumers share.

A friend of mine was a leading affiliate for an information product, selling over $300,000 worth of someone else’s service. How did they reward him? They cloned his sales channel and killed his business model. Everything that is not a memory, brand, or experience is becoming a commodity. What prevents you or I from becoming a commodity?”

Aaron Wall
SeoBook.com

Commenting on counter-productive Facebook “becon incident” backlash...

“The larger issue and concern for me is the piling on from bloggers and questionable Political Action Groups when it comes to pounding on Mark Zukerberg. I turn fifty in 22 days so I can clearly say Mark is a kid. He is going to make lots of mistakes and he will continue to learn and grow. Focusing in on him and how he personally handed it, dissecting his blog posts, etc, is just silly…

We need to use care in beating up Zuckerberg and Facebook in general because we want these folks to push the limits of finding new ideas and trying to make sense out of all the data flowing everywhere. Try it and get some reactions, adjust, find the happy center, rinse and repeat. That’s what Facebook should be doing and all the users and give feedback about the business. If they go off sides, it will get corrected, it always does. If they do really bad things, people vote with the mouse clicks. Just ask MySpace or AOL’s GeoCities.”

Rick Segal
JLA Ventures

“Most ad networks will start producing their own content to advertise against; and some content companies today will get acquired by ad networks (in 2008).”

Marshall Kirkpatrick
ReadWriteWeb.com

“1. Search is 2% of all media budget. Big agencies aren’s incented to “get” search.

2. To agencies, search is DR (direct response) and should be relegated to a DR silo and judged on DR metrics.

3. Search is granular (lots of pushing little levers). That’s not what big agencies do best.

4. Agencies exist to persuade people to buy something when they weren’t considering it. Search is “multiple choice” giving people a list of things to choose from when they’re already in the consideration phase.”

Gord Hotchkiss
via MediaPost

While speaking at LeWeb3 on the subject of “green businesses” in today’s Web business ecosystem…

“If you were to try and sell Squidooo, Blogspot or Technorati in their current state today they would not be worth much money—because they’re so polluted.  Nobody wants to buy real estate in a town that’s filled with toxic waste… and those three towns are filled with toxic waste. 

So actually if you do these bad things and pollute the river you’re actually going to have a hard time having an exit.”

Jason Calacanis
CEO
Mahalo.com