Marketing Pilgrim

Maybe I’m not the best qualified to make assumptions about why Amazon Associates–the online retailers affiliate program–just pulled the plug on allowing affiliates to send referrals via paid search, but that doesn’t stop me from making an educated guess.

PPC Arbitrage.

I suspect that Amazon finally realized that it could do its own keyword bidding and cut out the middle-man–those bidding pennies on long-tail keywords and making dollars in affiliate commissions. Here’s the email that Amazon just sent out to its affiliates:

Dear Amazon Associate:

We’re writing to let you know about a change to the Amazon Associates Program. After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

Today’s Wall Street Journal is reporting more potential concerns for the newspaper industry as Boston Globe’s owner, the New York Times Co. threatens to shutter the paper unless unions give more concessions. This comes after 500 jobs have already been shed since 200.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News have been two of the higher profile papers to either go online only or close shop. The Chicago Sun-Times has gone Chapter 11. The news for the newspaper industry continues to get worse and worse. Now, one of the most respected names in the industry, the Boston Globe, is staring down the barrel of some serious trouble.

By Peter Young

With Google announcing a number of changes recently the noise from the other search engines,  or lack of it, has been noticeable. It is therefore good to hear Yahoo announce a range of improvements to its image search preview pages, with the hope that these should make the pages easier to use.

The changes to the image search preview pages are immediately obvious on entry, with the now familiar (sleeker in Yahoo’s words) navigation interface which includes:

• Search box with the now familiar search assistance
• More image search results within the preview facility, which allows greater browsing between results
• Suggestions based on queries from other users making similar searches

New Results pages

The Old Results pages

First, the good news. YouTube is the most popular video site on the Internet. They’ill make $240 million in revenue. They just signed a deal with Disney to help bring in that money. But the bad news is pretty bad—$711 million in expenses, according to Credit Suisse.

About half of that bill is bandwidth alone, $360 million. Don’t worry, Credit Suisse showed its work:

To arrive at the estimated $360 million bandwidth tab for YouTube, the analysts assumed the site will receive 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and that a maximum of 20% of those users are on the site at any given time. Credit Suisse’s analysis then assumed each user downloads a video at 400 kilobits per second, to yield a peak bit run-rate for YouTube of 30 million megabits per second.

…these fine companies. All of which helped keep the lights on at Marketing Pilgrim this month. Please consider showing your appreciation by doing business with them.

Cheers!

Full Sail University – check out their new Internet Marketing Bachelor’s Degree. You can take it online!

Text Link Brokers – increase your traffic and search engine rankings.

WPromote – offers a wide range of professional search engine marketing services.

Reciprocal Consulting – standing by to help you with your next pay per click management campaign.

Sponsored Reviews – bloggers earn cash for reviewing products and services. Advertisers build buzz and links for your web site.

Vertical Leap – offers search engine optimization and PPC management services.

PRWeb – the next time you send a press release, try PRWeb–it’s the newswire I personally use.

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