Yahoo and Microsoft confirmed yesterday that Yahoo’s search results are now fully powered by Bing.  This comes after the two companies signed a 10-year deal for Microsoft to power the search results and for Yahoo to use Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising platform.  The deal was approved by authorities in the United States and Europe this past February.  Microsoft is slated to takeover several other languages in the weeks and months to come (according to a senior vice president for Microsoft).  Yahoo is expected to begin using AdCenter as early as October but according to a recent earnings call, Yahoo’s CEO said they’re not going to be rushed.

If you would have told me this ten years ago I would say you are crazy.  This just shows how fast things in the online world can change.  Once an industry leader, Yahoo is now paired with competition.  Google still remains strong but Facebook is creeping up behind as the second most popular site online (according to Alexa).  What is the next big thing?  How many new opportunities does this deal bring for affiliate marketers?  Another reason why I love my job…

Thoughts??

This Sunday Affiliate Summit East will kickoff at the Hilton Hotel in Downtown Manhattan, New York City. If you haven’t already registered for the show I’m afraid it’s too late (unless you get lucky on eBay) as the show has sold out. Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have done a fantastic job creating an informative show that has become the most popular in the affiliate marketing industry.

John, Richard, and I will all arrive in the city on Sunday and will be staying until Wednesday. We’ve got a pretty tight schedule, but look forward to meeting many of our readers during the Exhibit Hall and various events. I also look forward to attending the IANteract Dinner Sponsored by Kitara Media on Sunday with many other top affiliate marketers. If you see any of us walking around don’t hesitate to come right up to us as we’re not shy .

I’m also going to be bringing my Flip Cam (thanks again Azoogle) and will try to capture some mini interviews with a few people in the industry. Additionally, you’re going to want to stay tuned to SuperAffiliateTwins.com throughout the weekend and early next week as we’ll be blogging throughout the duration of the show! I love New York City and can’t wait to return!

Are you going?

Saturday, August 28th I’ll be heading out to California to speak at the Orange County Meetup202 hosted by Habitat Agency. I’ll be discussing in detail Media Buying providing insights as to how the industry has evolved since the 90s and where I see the future going. From the types of offers that can be promoted via a media, to planning your media buy, International media buying, I’ll be covering it all! I’ll also be accepting questions at the end of my presentation.

I invite you all in the area to come out and hear what I have to say as I’m sure I can help both beginners and experts. The Orange County Meetup202 is one of the larger ones in the United States so I encourage you go ahead and reserve your spot as soon as possible. There is only 100 spots total. I’m very excited and honored to be asked by Habitat Agency to come out and host a presentation. It should be not only a very informative meeting, but a lot of fun for us all!

You can read more details on the official Meetup202 website at this link.

A few weeks ago CPA Lead lost a bunch of their ‘free survey offers’. The day they pulled them their CEO Robert Reynolds was in their internal chat room (in their publisher UI) speaking with affiliates reassuring them things would soon return to normal. While tons of rumors surfaced as to the reason why, I decided to stay away and run with another incentive network.

Eventually they sent an email to publishers explaining that changes were coming:

Dear publishers,

Our offer selection and payouts are soon to be on the rise!

As many of you already know, there is tremendous scrutiny on the incentive advertising community, so we’re instituting a few proactive safety measures to ensure best payouts.

We are further increasing our compliance team’s effort to ensure content offered by our publisher’s meet our advertiser’s individual requirements and standards. This means that publisher’s who do not meet our unique advertiser’s requirements, will not see offers provided by those advertisers listed under their Surveys tab for promotion.

It is understood that this may be a slight inconvenience to some of you and we apologize, but this inconvenience will result in additional too-good-to-be-true offers at better payout rates for the larger majority of CPAlead publishers. As well, this means that many surveys that you use to love to promote will be returning due to our new-targeted compliance effort – at better payouts!

As always, please contact your personal affiliate manager with any questions or concerns. We’re here to help.

– CPAlead

Today I received a package from my home office (in Beckley,WV) with a large envelope from CPA Lead. It was a mousepad along with a letter announcing that they are coming out with a rewards program for publishers. In my opinion this is a pretty good PR move as I really enjoy freebies (no matter how small they are). This small gift has actually changed the way I think about CPA Lead and will likely mean that I will soon once again continue my relationship with them.

Did you guys get your free mousepad?

I did a podcast with my good friend (and very talented Internet Entrepreneur) Ian Fernando this past week.  We had a pretty good discussion about the Internet Marketing industry.  You can check it out on Ian’s blog at this link.

According to CNN, California’s legislature has been throwing a pretty interesting idea around involving digital license plates and advertisements that broadcast after a car has stopped for a few moments.  Kind of reminds me when I first started noticing advertisements on shopping carts as a kid…

“The technology could provide an additional source of revenue for the cash-strapped state, according to Price, the bill’s author, as advertisers and technology companies contract with the Department of Motor Vehicles. He said the plates could also aid small businesses and add jobs to the ailing economy in the technology, sales and marketing, and service industries.”

As mentioned in the article below, the idea was stemmed by the Senate to simply trim down the huge deficit California has of around $19 billion.   However, I feel like this idea could establish a pretty good niche industry in itself with only a handful of concerns. First, as many people have sounded off in the article’s comments, a major concern is safety… However, as long as the car is actually stopped and the advertisement is on for five to ten seconds, it’s not going to be that big of a deal, IMO.  People are usually fiddling with their audio controls or cell phones while they wait anyways so what’s the difference?

Secondly, one of my concerns is who would make the money and why would people be apt to allowing the government to make money off their license?  (Especially if a plug or adapter has to be added to their car increasing costs)  I think the government could most easily get around this by not only installing the equipment somehow but also offering some type of licensing fee discount or bonus.  It would be even better if people could make money off their own advertisements though, or better yet, join a service where affiliate marketers like ourselves can purchase the advertisements from them.  (I can see it now, people driving in rush hour traffic charging X amount more than people who drive during less primetime hours.)  The government could simply license these individuals to do this and charge for the license in order to make their money directly.   The only problem I see with this is that the approval departments for these type of advertisements would be a nightmare… sorting through NSFW images and what not…

You can check out more about the digital license advertisement idea here on CNN.   I think it goes without saying that I would definitely advertise on my licensing plate even if I had to pay a fee but I know one thing for certain, I would really have to invest in a good 8-character domain name… The only question is, what decade will it be before West Virginia picks it up?

Back in September John posted about ‘Hydra Experiencing Troubled Times‘. It was announced this morning that they have been acquired by Adknowledge. Here is the press release:

Adknowledge Acquires Hydra, Leading CPA Affiliate Network

Acquisition Creates Industry’s Largest Affiliate Network, Consolidating Premium CPA and CPC Campaign Offerings for Publishers

LOS ANGELES, CA–(Marketwire – June 21, 2010) – Adknowledge, the largest privately-owned Internet ad network, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Hydra Group (www.hydragroup.com), a premium CPA (cost-per-acquisition) performance marketing network.

Starting immediately, Hydra affiliates will benefit from direct access to Adknowledge’s 6,500+ advertiser campaigns from their current Hydra login. After integration, affiliates within the combined Adknowledge-Hydra ecosystem will have access to 7,000+ of the industry’s most diverse and highest yielding CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA offers. This will establish Adknowledge as the largest affiliate network measured by its number of diverse offers.

As importantly, the acquisition of Hydra will benefit advertisers using Adknowledge’s Bidsystem platform (www.bidsystem.com) by connecting them to thousands of Hydra affiliates. This continues Adknowledge’s mission of creating a single “must buy” auction marketplace (www.bidsystem.com) for advertisers looking to expand beyond Yahoo! and Google. Through Bidsystem, Adknowledge advertisers expand their reach across display, social media, search, and email channels.

“We’re excited about establishing ourselves as a leader in the affiliate marketing space. We currently maintain market leadership positions with our social media and email advertising businesses, and believe that Hydra will allow us to achieve the leading position in the affiliate industry over the next 18 months,” said Scott Lynn, Adknowledge’s chief executive officer. “Having looked at dozens of affiliate networks as acquisition candidates, we believe Hydra to be the best fit because of its focus on high-quality distribution for their advertisers. We believe strongly that through Hydra’s current compliance efforts, affiliate approval process, and distribution ‘best practices,’ we will set a higher bar within the affiliate community.”

“Since Hydra’s launch, we have delivered millions of new customers to clients like AARP and Kraft, and helped thousands of premium publishers financially benefit from their promotion of these campaigns to their audiences. The result is we’ve built an incredibly healthy advertiser and affiliate marketplace that will increase in scale dramatically as we now join forces with Adknowledge,” said Zac Brandenberg, founder of Hydra. The Hydra brand will be retained in the near term and operate alongside Adstation (www.adstation.com), Adknowledge’s existing affiliate offering where publishers are paid on a CPC basis.

“Our bid-based marketplace at www.bidsystem.com allows our affiliates to maximize yield as CPC rates increase over time. By combining our flexible CPC payouts with Hydra’s broad portfolio of leading fixed payouts for premium CPA campaigns, we will now offer the most complete affiliate solution in the marketplace,” said Greg Bayer, general manager of Adknowledge’s Affiliate Division.

The Hydra acquisition demonstrates how industry leaders like Adknowledge are growing strong despite the economic downturn, and evolving the performance marketing space by improving efficiency and increasing scale for advertisers. “Adknowledge is the largest marketplace for advertisers seeking a one-stop-shop for all of their marketing outside of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Facebook. Rather than working with hundreds of small companies, advertisers are able to manage all of their non-search media buying through www.bidsystem.com. The Hydra acquisition simply cements our position as a leader in the industry and helps take us one step closer to a ‘must-buy’ marketplace for these advertisers,” said Lynn.

About Adknowledge
Adknowledge, the largest privately-owned internet advertising network, operates a single, auction-based advertiser marketplace at www.bidsystem.com where advertisers can go to solve all of their marketing needs outside of search. Through Bidsystem, Adknowledge syndicates advertisers across multiple channels, including Social, Email, and Web Content. Prior acquisitions include Super Rewards, MIVA, Cubics, Lookery, Mediarun, and Adonomics.

Featured on CNBC as “the next Google,” Adknowledge is profitable with annual revenues in excess of $250 million. Headquartered in Kansas City, Adknowledge has domestic offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Florida, and international offices in Vancouver, London, and Sydney. For more information, visit www.adknowledge.com.

About Hydra
Hydra operates a leading CPA network for many of the largest and best-known consumer product and services companies. The company distributes customer acquisition campaigns in search, email, web display and social media, via its own internal media distribution groups and its exclusive network of high volume, high quality publishing partners. Learn more at www.hydragroup.com.

Advisors
Keith Biancamano of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP represented Adknowledge.

A team from New York-based investment bank Petsky Prunier, led by Sanjay Chadda, served as Hydra’s financial advisor in the transaction.

Adding on to my latest post, you can easily add the Facebook Like button to your blog by installing the Facebook Like Button Plugin for WordPress.  Good luck!

Last month Facebook introduced their Open Graph protocol; an exciting new way to integrate your web pages into the ‘social graph’.  In Layman’s terms this mean’s websites all around the Internet can insert the ‘Like’ button and when a visitor clicks it, the ‘Like’ is added to the count, broadcasted to their Facebook News Feed, included in search results, and added to profile interests.  Pretty cool huh?  Until now websites had to have ‘fan pages’ setup and then could go onto to insert a box on their website where visitors could ‘like’ the site.  This is a much easier option and can be installed on multiple pages of a website.

The only requirement to ‘Like’ a website is to be logged in to your Facebook account.  To install there are five required properties: title, type, image, url, and site name.  An example from the Facebook Developers section is:

<html xmlns:og=”http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/”
xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”>
<head>
<title>The Rock (1996)</title>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”The Rock”/>
<meta property=”og:type” content=”movie”/>
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/”/>
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg”/>
…
</head>
…
</html>

After the five required properties are added you just have to insert the button via JavaScript or an IFRAME.

<fb:like href=”http://developers.facebook.com/” width=”450″ height=”80″/>

Pretty simple to install but very powerful!  I was reading a message board the other day (very uncommon for me) and someone mentioned that this new feature will make ‘many millionaires this year’.  I have to somewhat agree.  If used properly, this opens up a whole new stream of traffic for websites, and ultimately, traffic = money.  The more traffic, the more money.

I’ve already seen several affiliates begin taking advantage of this by adding the ‘Like’ button to their landing pages.  If a visitor likes that page, they click it, and it broadcasts out to a whole new set of eyes for free!  Genius!

You want to be careful when using this new feature as Facebook is already handing out cease and desist letters left and right to people that abuse this.  They even have the power to block your URL from Facebook which could be very bad, especially for long term growth.

You can read more about the Open Graph protocol on the Facebook Developers section.  Take advantage of this today!

Tonight I went to my local Walmart store in Huntington, West Virginia to find a big surprise…  The entire store was different!  The floor, the layout, the sections, the colors, and even the computers at the checkout (not to mention no more self-checkouts) were different.  I felt like a child on Christmas!  Being a business-minded person, I was almost to the point of giggles by seeing what a good job Walmart’s corporate management has done adapting to change.

While in business school at West Virginia University, several of my professors constantly pounded in my head about how important it was to adapt to change.  With time comes change, and for businesses to continue to be successful, they must adapt to this.  Richard and I have both blogged about adapting to change in the past, but it is so important I feel like I should mention it again.

The Internet changes quicker than any other business.  Think about this day ten years ago (May 20, 2000).  We had no clue what a ‘Facebook’ was and still relied on Yahoo to perform the majority of our searches.  Today, Facebook is a company worth billions, and Google is the search-engine leader.  Just a year ago many affiliates promoted campaigns that you can’t even find on the best affiliate network today.

Let’s face it.  The affiliate marketers that were successful a year ago and are still successful today have adapted to change.  The affiliate marketers that were successful a year ago and are not successful today have done a poor job adapting.  I’m going to be the first to admit, change is not always fun.  A lot of times change takes you out of your ‘comfort zone’ and puts you in an area that can be very intimating.    A lot of times people don’t accept change but eventually adapt to it.

If you don’t get anything else out of this post, please remember to consider change with everything you do while working online.  Remember that especially online things change very quickly and it is essential that you stay up-to-date and adapt your business accordingly.