The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘affiliate’

Affiliate fees are all over the web and often we don’t even know that we are clicking on affiliate links when we click through to make purchases at our favorite online retailers. On average, affiliate fees can range from 3 to 10 percent of the price of a product. Browsarity is hoping to put money collected from affiliate programs to philanthropic use, and keep a portion for itself in the process. The Y Combinator-incubated company has launched a Firefox plug-in that will rewrite any unclaimed links to a participating online retailer with an affiliate link, and donate any fees collected towards the charity of your choice.

Once downloaded, Browsarity will automatically scan any links to determine if there is an affiliate program and link associated with the retailer and will underline the link in red. So if you search to buy an iPhone on Google or read a blog post with a link to a book on Amazon, Browsarity will underline the affiliate links for retailers which could result in fees that go to charity. If you purchase the item through the affiliate link, the fees will be deposited into a PayPal account operated by Browsarity. Most of the fees in that account will be donated to a charity of your choice. Browsarity will take a 10 percent cut of each affiliate fee, so 90 percent is donated to the charity.

Currently Browsarity offers nine different charities to choose from, including The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the Black Eyed Peas’ charity PeaPod. The startup says it has partnerships with at least ten “big-name” e-retailers to collect affiliate fees for charity.

There is also a viral component to the service. You can send your friends and family links to install copies of Browsarity pre-set for a certain charity, and the system will keep track of how much money has been generated for that charity as a result of your efforts. In an effort to preserve users’ privacy, Browsarity doesn’t track individual purchases.

While only available for Firefox at the moment, Browsarity will be launching plug-ins and extensions for Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer in the coming weeks. The startup faces competition from Browse For A Cause, which has a similar model.

A few weeks ago, we noted that the Denver, CO-based design company Aten Design Group was holding a funeral for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the much-hated browser. The funeral took place last night. It wasn’t without controversy as there were protestors, and even a bouquet of flowers sent by Microsoft. But overall, it looks like it was a classy ceremony.

The blog Nonprofits and Web 2.0 was on hand and has posted several videos (a few of which I’ll embed below). There’s also a huge set of pictures in this Flickr album. As we noted originally, despite the funeral, IE6 is likely to live on for a few years as many sites are likely to still support it for the foreseeable future (though YouTube turns off support next week). And don’t forget all those pour souls in corporate jobs who are forced to use the browser because their IT departments won’t allow them to upgrade.

Microsoft itself is trying to get users to upgrade from IE6 (to their updated IE8), and the flowers that they sent to the funeral speak to that. The card sent with the flowers read: “Thanks for the good times, IE6. See you all @ MIX, where we’ll show a little piece of IE heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft“

[photos: flickr/atendesigngroup]

U.K. startup Skimlinks is hoping to revolutionize the affiliate model by turning normal product links into affiliate links. The startup gives publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants across a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publishers makes money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions. Today, the startup is launching a nifty discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword.

The desktop tool, called a Skimkit, is powered by Adobe AIR and is essentially a live searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.

So, If a website publisher is searching for a link for red shoes, the user can search for red shoes on the Skimbit. The startup will produce results from retailers who have affiliate programs for links. SkimKit also features a service that creates shortened, monetized links for use in Twitter and email newsletters. SkimKit is available for free to Skimlinks publishers.

Skimlinks, which was born from Skimbit, is already being uses as a monetization service on more than a half million sites worldwide and has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding. Publishers using the affiliate service include Elle.com, The Daily Mirror, and a number of fashion blogs and sites.

Image recognition technology startup Kooaba yesterday released an API that definitely deserves some developer attention.

The Swiss company aims to unlock its library of over 10 million images, ranging from album covers to books and movie posters, and provide access to all that precious data via the cloud.

Kooaba hopes that the launch of the API will trigger third-party developers to develop more mobile applications – iPhone and Android versions exist already – or tools that tap into social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, etcetera.

Here’s a video of Kooaba for iPhone in case you’re familiar with the company and its offering:

SocialToo, a startup that lets you manage your personal connections on Twitter and Facebook, has launched an affiliate program to allow users to reap a profit from referring other users to the service. For each type of service you refer people to join on SocialToo, the startup will pay you 20 percent of the cost of that service via PayPal-powered TwitPay, right through Twitter.

SocialToo, which launched a universal Facebook to Twitter posting feature earlier this year, provides tools for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts such as auto-following, auto-unfollowing, auto-messaging, along with daily stats surrounding new follows and unfollow and the ability to conduct surveys from followers. Its plethora of features are ideal for marketers and brands who want to learn the most they can from those they follow. SocialToo’s features range anywhere from $5 for following back everyone who follows you to $25 to unfollow everyone who you’ve ever followed before.

Using Twitter-based payment system, TwitPay, users can Tweet and share links with friends on Twitter, Facebook, blogs or websites. Here’s what the message and link will looks like:

Catch up following those that follow you on Twitter: click here

When someone clicks the link, they’ll be taken to SocialToo, but a special, customized overlay will pop over the main page welcoming them to SocialToo with the referring user’s Twitter profile image next to the welcome message. The will tell the visitor about the type of service the referrer has recommended and will invite them to provide their screen name and enter the purchase process. For every affiliate link where a user purchases a SocialToo service, affiliates collect 20 percent of the fee.

At the end of each month, SocialToo will send out a payment to each affiliate via Twitpay. It’s fairly easy. This is definitely an interesting idea to get viral growth but the affiliate program is sure to raise some eyebrows in the Twittersphere. Sponsored Tweets from Ad.ly, a platform that links up high-profile advertisers with Twitter users to disseminate marketing campaigns (and produce a revenue stream for Twitter users), have been criticized as a viable advertising model. Advertising in your stream and then monetizing off of other users could be construed in a negative way.

Tweetbucks and even Amazon also allow users to collect affiliate fees from their Tweet streams.

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Our earlier report about Critical Path buying mobile services startup ShoZu turns out to have been right on the money. Tomorrow morning, both companies will jointly announce that they have come to an agreement for Critical Path to acquire all of ShoZu for an undisclosed sum. We’re trying to get a hold of the price the London company, which was backed by $36 million in venture capital, sold for.

The release is below, but here are more details, including some deal terms:

(after the jump)

Bandsintown, a platform for connecting live music fans to local live concerts and bands through personalized recommendations and notifications, is publicly releasing its API and launching an affiliate program which lets anyone share revenue from concert tickets sold on their sites.

Bandsintown, which was incubated at Launchbox Digital, basically aggregates concert ticket information from 62 separate ticket marketplaces (currently the site lists 200,000 concerts).

But the beauty of the startup is that they’ve exposed their API so that other music sites can integrate the concert listings. Bandsintown’s technology is compelling because it connects to music players like iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn a user’s music preferences, and then lets users track their favorite artists and receive alerts when there are events of interest near where they live.

The Bandsintown API lets people filter listings by by artist, location, date, and also recommends shows specific to a website’s or user’s musical tastes.

Now, Bandintown is creating further incentives for music sites to integrate its listings by launching the Affiliate Program. The revenue share is 50/50, so anyone who participates in the program will get half of whatever Bandsintown receives from its its third-party ticketing partners.

Hype Machine, TuneGenie, Pure Volume and Absolute Punk are music sites that are already using the Bandsintown API and participating in the affiliate program. Competitors to Bandsintown include Songkick, Last.fm, and Setlist.fm.

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RingRevenue, a pay-per-call platform designed for affiliate networks, has closed a $3.5 million funding round led by GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, and Great Pacific Capital. The company is looking to tap into the huge volume of sales that occur via the telephone, helping affiliate networks and ad agencies track phone calls in much the same way online ad clicks are tracked.

The platform allows affiliate networks to assign both unique local and toll free phone numbers to publishers running a given ad campaign. These unique numbers can then be used by the advertiser to track the performance of their publishers’ campaigns and compensate them accordingly. CEO and founder Jason Spievak acknowledges that there are other companies offering call tracking to advertisers, but says that these weren’t built with the affiliate community in mind. Using most other systems, advertisers are forced to manage the logistics of distributing the numbers to publishers and subsequently compensating them. RingRevenue lets advertisers leave the logistical issues to the affiliate networks, who are well versed in them.

The platform also includes a number of features designed to help advertisers maximze their returns. RingRevenue can filter inbound callers in real time, which allows advertisers to selectively choose which callers they’d like to deal with. The service does this by matching phone numbers against a large database of known callers, using data that the company has acquired in-house, along with a number of third party data vendors.

Despite the fact that RingRevenue launched in stealth only nine months ago, it has managed to sign up four of the top ten affiliate networks, including Commission Junction. Aside from its impressive roster of clients, RingRevenue has experience on its side — many of the teammembers previously helped create CallWave, an online telecommunications company that went public in 2004.

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Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads.

Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message.

Every time people click your link and your recommendation results in a purchase, the online merchant pays a commission to you. For example, referral fees for Amazon’s Associates program hover around 6%, BestBuy pays out 3-4%, and CompUSA pays around 6%. Tweetbucks will take 30% of the money you earn through each referral leaving you with 70%. So if you send out a link via a Tweet to a Kindle being sold on Amazon for $359.00 and someone purchases the Kindle from the link, you will receive $15.12 and Tweetbucks will take $6.46. On the other hand, if your affiliate fee comes from a book on Barnes & Noble (which also pays out 6%) that totals $16.76, you will receive $0.70 cents and Tweetbucks will get $0.30 cents.

Tweetbucks also lets you earn money off of any non-retail site, by allowing you to enable a “custom ad-frame,” on a site you Tweet the link to. Tweetbucks displays an ad at the top of your destination page and you earn a variable rate (CPC) on every click. You can also customize this ad frame to include a hyperlinked logo of your choice. The compensation from this doesn’t seem to have as much potential as the affiliate fees; Sukornyk says returns are around $1 to $2 per thousand clicks.

Tweetbucks give you a complimentary $5 in your account to start with and pays you via PayPal each month. You can also earn a 10% commission on all revenue earned by people you refer to Tweetbucks for 6 months after their approval date. It’s a little shady to be sending out links to friends and followers with out them knowing they you will be making a cut off of their sale. Sukornyk encourages Tweetbucks users to add the hashtag #tweetbucks at the end of any link so that people who click on your link will know whats in it for you.

This has a few similarities to Microsoft’s controversial CashBack program, which gives users monetary incentives to click through and buy products from the ads they’re shown. But Tweetbucks gives users the power to make money from others (and forbids the user to click and buy from the links themselves).

There seems to be the whole double edged sword issue with Tweetbucks. The more affiliate links you send out, the more people will probably purchase from that link and the more money you will make. But the more links you send out, whether it be via Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed, the more you hover on that line of being a pseudo-spammer of links to retail sites. And you could come across as opportunistic if you send out a ton of links that make you money every day, regardless of whether you disclose or not. I guess it was inevitable that services would eventually leverage the power of links with Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook for monetary purposes. For some reason, it just doesn’t sit right with me.

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Around noon Pacific time today, a small meme broke out on the Internet. At nearly the exact same time, over a dozen Twitter accounts all tweeted out the message “Oh i had the day off work lol. thats why im home.” All were sent out from what appear to be the Twitter accounts of cute girls. Why? Because they’re all automated spam accounts set up by some lame online dating site.

Spamming a social network by creating fake accounts with pictures of cute girls is as old as social networking itself. But this one on Twitter is tricky because when you look all the accounts individually, they look like they may be legit. All use different names, have different pictures and use different bios. But all link to the same site (with the same BS ad campaign URL) and all have tweet streams that are exactly the same, word for word.

It looks like this Singlesnet site (or someone trying to reap the affiliate benefits) built a grass-roots spamming campaign of Twitter with these girls. But what’s odd is that it seems to be working somewhat. While most of these accounts seem to be following a good number of fake accounts — ones with no profile pictures and no updates — they all appear to have a good number (in the hundreds) of what appear to be real followers. Whether its the cute icons, mundane fake updates or number of legit followers that leads others to follow them, I couldn’t tell you. But people are following the fake girls.

And if you were only following one of them, it’d be hard to know that they were fake. Some have the same pink flower background (seen in the screenshot below), but not all do — tricky. But the two tell-tale signs are if their bio links to that Singlesnet site, or if they tweeted the magic words today, “Oh i had the day off work lol. thats why im home.”

Previous fake tweets included “Getting ready for work! Hehe just got out of the shower pervs” — always a winner.

I’m not sure that the bios in these fake Twitter accounts aren’t populated from real bios for real girls on the dating site, but the tweets are definitely all BS. Hope you didn’t try to set up a date with one of these girls.

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