Amazon opens up affiliate marketing on Twitter

So it may only seem like five minutes ago but all the way back in July I commented on Amazon's policy of rejecting affiliate commissions for sales generated through social media, specifically Twitter, in part due to a clause that requires sales to be generated from the domain listed in the Associate account the affiliate holds with Amazon.

Well this week Amazon appears to have, if not made a u-turn, then at least gone back on that position somewhat. Based on what I have seen they have not publicly acknowledged any change of policy but earlier this week they communicated a new feature that enables their affiliates to click a button from within Amazon to create a tweet promoting the page they were on at the time.  Interestingly, despite evidence to suggest Amazon would use their own short-url service, these affiliate links use the popular Bit.ly service instead.

It seems a sensible move. We all know that online communication is increasingly moving away from a one-way broadcast model and therefore the volumes to be got through links placed on specific affiliate sites may well be on the decrease. What's more, Twitter's popularity seems to be in no way declining with news stories today suggesting that Twitter is achieving growth through increasing adoption from a youth audience. It is worth noting this contradicts some of the expert research Morgan Stanley released earlier this year that suggested Twitter didn't appeal to teens (excuse me whilst I remove my tongue from my cheek).

It will be interesting to see where this goes next. Given Amazon's policy on Affiliates only promoting their products on their own site it is not currently clear whether the links generated through this new method would still work if posted elsewhere (Facebook for example) but the evidence suggest they will, and that Amazon are no longer actively enforcing this policy. There is also still a lot of concern regarding the use of monetized links on Twitter (and social media generally) and what's more, given the current FTC review going on in the US, the use of such links without clear labelling could soon be illegal.

What do people think? Is it smart of Amazon to get in there and allow users to make money out of their social network now (before someone else gets in there) or is Twitter somewhere that should really stay 'ad' free?

Google: Even Better Than The Real (Time) Thing?

As we all know, Facebook were the top dog in social networking until Twitter came along and started to steal some of its thunder with the introduction of real time search. So in August, Facebook upped their game with the $50 million purchase of Friend Feed. Many commentators at the time said that the ability of Facebook to improve its real time search offering using Friend Feed's technology, whilst not the fabled ‘Google killer' many are waiting for, was something that would really affect the way users look at search and at least would make the boffins in Mountain View do some serious thinking. Do users want ‘algorithm search' based on how people link to each other like the current model of Google (and, though not executed as well, Bing which also now provides the organic results for Yahoo as well) or a ‘social graph' based on people's relationships and conducted in real time like Twitter and Facebook/Friend Feed?

Google know that real time could be the future and the fact that they hadn't managed to get on top of that was a real concern. Google did launch "Search options" in May, allowing users to filter their search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a "wonder wheel" view, or a timeline view. But that's not "real time search", is it?

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that month, "Google has done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis... We will do a good job of things now we have these examples."

And, true to their word, on October 21^st there were some big announcements.

At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, the President of Microsoft's Online Services Group, Qi Lu announced the integration of real time Tweets into Bing.  Later, the same day Google's Marissa Mayer announced the same thing for the market leaders as well as a new Google Labs product called "Social Search". This is a new feature that allows the user to see results for queries from people in their social network.  According to Tech Crunch, it is likely that these updates will only be included if the data is open, which would seem to exclude Facebook but not Twitter (as long as the Twitterer doesn't lock their Tweets). This could be huge for Twitter in terms of taking their offering to the next level and who knows, this deal may mean that they may actually make some money now, though CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that "revenue was not the focus of the deals." Of course, Bing and Google have slightly different algorithms so observing the difference in how they filter useful Tweets for the user will be interesting but it does seem a natural next stage for the search giants to include these updates in their results, just as they currently do for news stories, much to the intransigent chagrin of, for example, Rupert Murdoch or Sly Bailey.

So is this going to drive more people to use Twitter or has their uptake peaked making this just a new way of cluttering up increasingly option heavy search results on Google's once famously clean pages? Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers' experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect? Only time will tell but the outcome may dictate the way search evolves in the foreseeable future.

Media owners and the move to paid content

Well, it looks like they're going to give it a go. With display ad revenues not enough to make substantial, or indeed any, profit, according to a survey from the Association of Online Publishers, around 70% of online publishers in the newspaper, magazine or TV industries will pay for content online.

I believe that a lot of them will be heading for a fall. There are simply too many of these mass media dinosaurs providing content that is too similar and usually available for free somewhere else. But admittedly, there are some big brands here with sometimes over 200 years of audience building, so surely that will count for something?

The truth is that no one really knows but last week a paidContentUK/Harris Interactive poll showed that only 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay for online access. Though if a free or discounted subscription to a printed paper were thrown in as well, that would rise to 48%. A huge leap. As a Guardian reader to has seen the price of the paper hit the £1 barrier for the first time, I find this idea is particularly appealing and as newspapers make far more money from advertising that cover price, it could be an option. Albeit surely quite a radical one.

In the Guardian last week Andrew Freeman, Harris's senior technology, media and telecoms consultant, said that this model of combining charges together for printed and digital content is "an interesting possible picture of the future": "The value of this type of reader, engaged with the content, and (because of the subscription structure) much more likely to be brand loyal, would be massively higher to advertisers. If newspapers can deliver this sort of model - combining the best of both media within a paid-for relationship, then the future will be more certain, but certainly different."

Unfortunately the bad news is that "when asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us [the poll] the lowest possible amount in each category - annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p". I still believe that there are not enough newspapers readers that are loyal enough to a brand for all the current national brands to survive this change, and for those that survive this digital/print mixed subscription could be the way forward but these numbers don't really seem strong enough to prop up the bank balance of national newspapers, especially when ad revenues will be affected by the fall in traffic that will surely come from putting up a paywall.

Moreover, yesterday in the Guardian, the same poll asks about how those payments would manifest themselves and it would seem that the preferred method of carrying out this revolution (and it really is no less than that) is by no means decided.

53% of consumers said that they would prefer a subscription of up to a year which will upset the champions of the latest media wunderkind- the micro payment. Paying a few pence per article is the method that many have put forward as something more appealing to consumer especially since Google revealed a fortnight ago that they would roll out their out system of micro payments, possibly as an extension of Google Checkout, in a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.

Freeman says, ""There's been a lot of buzz about micro-payment recently, and some prominent players, like Google, have moved into this field, but there are massive challenges: and not just technical ones. From a simple business point of view, micropayments are disproportionately expensive to administer until you have an enormous volume and value, it just won't be worthwhile. If consumers are going to give up their preference for single-subscription payments they can more easily check and monitor, they will need to have real confidence and trust in the brands they use. Micropayments will probably benefit only the very largest of companies."

Not good news for all but very few large scale media owners who want to make money from content. Long established institutions will fall before a system is settled upon, that much seems certain.

Surfing the Google Wave

Yes, sorry - I did just do that.

So this week we have been playing with that over-hyped new toy from Google, Wave. If you aren't familiar with it (and at the moment invites are like gold dust!) then it is basically a combination between email, IM and a wiki. You setup a 'Wave' and pick who is part of the Wave (from just yourself, up to everyone who uses the system) and then just typing... Content is updated in real time so if multiple users are looking at the same wave at the same time you can see the content being changed in front of your eyes - it's a little unnerving knowing all those typos could be being watched! Text and gadgets can be added, meaning you could add videos etc, but the overall flow of Waves, at the moment at least, is fairly basic.

Innevitably people are already asking what, exactly, is the point of all this?

And I'm not going to pretend I have the answer... What I can say however is that whilst it doesn't necessarily do anything wholely new, it does a unique combination of common things. By allowing users to edit text and documents together it provides a neat platform for collaboration, although in reality most businesses would be better off using Google Docs - and quite why more businesses don't is beyond me (it's free and very easy to share and collaborate over documents). But it also provides and easy way to keep a threaded conversation that remains persistent - useful for keeping track of projects for example.

Ultimately it's still early days - it took years for people to stop looking down at Twitter (and many still do) so I wouldn't expect everyone to jump on Wave just yet but it is encouraging to see Google finally bring something potentially revolutionary to the table, rather than simply gently evolving what others have done (see search, paid search, email and even the failed Knol.

So what do people think? Has anyone got on board yet?

TV eats digital dust

What a week - if you work in digital media you would have had to have your head buried in the sand to have not heard about this news by about 9:05am on Wednesday this week, let along Friday afternoon. But just in case you missed it: the IAB's latest spend figures finally brought the news that we've all been waiting for - in H1 2009 online advertising spend overtook TV ad spend for the first time, (sort of) giving it a larger share of spend than any other media.

The actual figures then - online ad spend grew by 4.6% but, in the context of a market that saw an overall contraction of 16.6%, this translated into a whopping jump in market share, up from 18.7% for the same period in 2008 to 23.5%!

As soon as the news broke there was much discussion at LBi as to whether the counting was fair - should digital really be lumped all into one or should it be split into display, search, affiliates and beyond?  To me this seemed a bit like the equivalent of saying DRTV, product placement and the sponsorship of X Factor should all be counted separately and I couldn't help but argue that just because tv is so one dimensional doesn't mean the rest of us deserve to get a raw deal when the money gets counted.  When you look across the other categories though, it is obvious that by that logic digital still has a way to go if it wants to have the largest share of spend - in the IAB's number print is actually split into classified and display, despite the fact that no such distinction is made for digital.

At the end of the day of course none of this is particularly important - as an agency or advertiser if you are buying in traditional and digital media (I don't, thankfully!) it may mean you should reconsider the respective weighting of your team.  What is important is how your channels work together and that's what advertisers need to be focused on, not which is biggest. The big takeaway though? That 16.6% decline in spend... We're still in a recession, folks, even if the sun shines on digital.

An Industry in the Dark?

It has been another interesting few weeks for the music industry. In the same week that Spotify’s iPhone app has stormed to the number one spot of iTunes Top Free Apps within just 48 hours of Apple approving it, we have had Sony and EMI come out and slam Virgin’s plans to offer a subscription based music download service.

This of course this is nothing new from an industry that is determined to avoid change of any kind. The industry has even been given renewed confidence in recent months as Peter Mandelson waded into the debate by announcing the government’s plans to cut off the internet connection of those who file share - a government decision even more extreme than Lord Carter’s recent Digital Britain report. Mandelson’s intervention may well have been influenced by recent meetings with certain music industry figure heads; but it highlights (as some commentators have suggested) that this really is a case of an analogue man living in a digital world. Trivial details such as who is going to be responsible for regulating this across ISP’s and not to mention who is going to pay for it, as usual, seem to have been brushed aside as minor formalities.

Whilst this Government backing may show signs that the music industry is winning its battle to desperately carry on with business as usual, I feel it may be short lived. In recent weeks we have seen YouTube lift its block on music videos after the PRS and Google came to a licensing agreement.  Whilst the lump sum has not been disclosed, I wouldn’t mind betting it is a lot less than the PRS was initially demanding. However, a deal was always going to have to be struck as the prospect of cutting off one of the industries key marketing channels was never a long term solution.

You might hope that this is a sign that the industry will start to face the realities of the digital world it has resisted for so long. This however will not sit easy with the major labels; they have for too long enjoyed far too much control over their distribution channels and avoided any deviation from their long established ways of doing things. Losing grip of even a little bit of this power does not sit easy with them. However, no matter how much government support they are able to drum up, a business model that relies on harassing, bulling and even suing its customer base seems destined for failure.

It has of course been obvious for years that the music industry will eventually have to move with the times and face up to a changing market which is seeing their revenues dwindling. What they seem to be missing is that people sharing and accessing music for free has always been a vital life blood of the music industry. Ok 25 years ago you had to sit down and make a mixed cassette tape, but the point is music has always been driven by a buzz that is created from people talking about and sharing music. The technology may have changed the scale on which this is possible, but this has also expanded the potential. 

People have to make living and it is yet to be seen if the likes of Spotify, Virgin and others can actually turn a profit out of subscription or ad supported revenue. My guess is that the industry will have to start embracing a more varied approach and spread their interests across licensing, ad supported revenue, subscription, merchandising and live music promotion. And yes there may even be a case that people will pay for a certain amount of digital tracks, although I feel a higher quality offering than is currently available will be needed. Naturally the major labels will continue to lobby for the government to support their out dated business models, but sooner or later they will have to take their heads out of the sand and come to terms with the fact that a more creative use of digital channels is the future of their industry.

The end of DVD rentals?

With the launch of the Spotify App for the iPhone interest for streaming music is higher than ever. There seems to be no limit for its reach, with new users streaming free music every day, changing the way people think about ownership of music forever. And it’s spreading.

LoveFilm, the video rental company that sends DVDs directly to your door, has announced a new (and for some films completely free) online streaming service that could completely change the way films are rented. With films available immediately at your fingertips , ‘traditional’ rental companies like Blockbuster would have to think long and hard about how to compete. Their sluggish uptake of the LoveFilm model of sending DVDs to your door hurt them badly, and if they make the same mistake this time around, it could spell disaster.  Admittedly, most films are currently ‘pay per view’ when streaming, and with the average internet download speed being where it is the quality of the films is not exactly ‘Blu-Ray standard’. But the room for expansion is massive, and with broadband speeds constantly increasing surely the only way for this market is up.

With the prospect of such a big market there have been rumours that Google, as always, may be throwing its hat in to the ring. Following trials that included making the movie Ghostbusters available on the site to watch for free for a limited time Google-owned Youtube have apparently been in talks with Sony and Time Warner to discuss an online streaming service and the effect was dramatic. Shares in Blockbuster dropped by 10% overnight!

Streaming films online is nothing new however, for years films have been available on illegal (but popular) websites, even on YouTube as it is today some films can be found. It is with these sites that LoveFilm and similar sites will have to compete, and this will be a difficult task, with many people simply not willing to pay to watch a film online. If YouTube brings films to our screens for free It will be very interesting to see what advertising formats open up to support these new content distribution channels and, importantly, whether 'free' can really support content which has, up until now at least, been considered premium.

What's in a (brand) name?

Monday morning we all woke up the news that Kraft Foods had made a £10bn bid for Cadbury, a bid which Cadbury quickly rejected the offer as it ‘undervalues the company’. Who says no to a takeover bid with a 31% premium on top of share price? – A brand which knows it can get a lot more.

Cadbury is the world’s second largest confectionery company with a stronghold in Britain and emerging markets which account for over one-third of the company’s revenue. Kraft is strong in markets such as Scandinavia and Brazil, where Cadbury has small presence.

Kraft is looking to use Cadbury’s strong brand presence in Britain and its positioning in emerging markets to create ‘a global powerhouse in snacks, confectionery and quick meals’.

I am not suggesting that a strong brand name is all a business should be about, but Cadbury’s decision to decline the Kraft bid had a lot to do with the strong brand Cadbury has created through innovative ad campaigns. We all know building a brand / brand equity requires huge investment and a long term commitment (not to mention a lot of creativity and market intelligence) and unfortunately the performance and return are never as easy to measure as they are with a direct response campaign. In the last couple of years, Cadbury has grown their brand through brilliantly planned and executed campaigns such as the ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Trucks’ spots – campaigns so persuasive we all forgot about the huge Cadbury product recall in June 2006. This means that, if they were to purchase Cadbury, Kraft would be able to focus on growing sales in Cadbury’s existing markets rather than their current conundrum – how to build Kraft’s own brands to be more personal and meaningful.

Kraft executive Michael Osanloo suggested that Cadbury was only worth what someone was willing to pay for it – as the world’s second largest confectionary company with average 12% growth per annum in emerging markets and a strong brand identity Cadbury doesn’t have to sell. Whether Kraft decides to put in a new (higher) bid or Hershey’s and Nestlé propose a counter offer, Cadbury is in the fortunate position of choosing when to sell.  Osanloo would perhaps have been closer to the mark then if he had said that Cadbury is only worth what someone is willing to pay when (and if) it actually decides to sell.

Yahoo target Twitter with a Meme of their own

There may once have been a time when a Yahoo! product launch, even if it is a sneak-it-out-the-back-door Beta style event, would have been a hot topic for discussion so it says a lot that many readers may not even have heard of Yahoo! Meme, their attempt to move into the world of Twitter and Tumblr. As Yahoo's first move into proper user-generated content creation for some time (ignoring purchases and Yahoo Answers) you would think they have spent their time coming up with something worthwhile - unfortunately it's a little difficult to avoid the feeling that this is a rushed job.

Currently Meme is only available in Portugese and that, to some extent, may justify it's existence. Indeed, our own international PR work at LBi has taught us the value of understanding different market's approaches to social networks. Unfortunately there does not seem to be too much to Meme beyond that. It differs from Twitter in that it lets you post text, images, MP3s and YouTube videos and it doesn't have a limit on the length of posts, unlike Twitter's restrictive 140 character limit. Other than that the main difference is that in order to comment on anything on Meme you re-post (an equivalent to a 're-tweet' on Twitter) it on your profile and then add your thoughts, meaning other users get to see what you are reading.

These features may sound interesting but I can't help but feel Yahoo might have missed the point. Firstly you can fairly easily post any of these types of content on Twitter already using links to third party sites, with more and more companies springing up aiming to make this as seamless as possible. Admittedly it means users have to go outside of Twitter to get the content but this has the benefit of making Twitter much easier to consume on the go and has made it very easy for almost endless third-party systems to plug in to the Twitter API. More to the point, if you want to share this type of content you are probably already doing so on Facebook or Tumblr anyway (or even a proper old-fashioned blog)! Even the re-post feature / requirement for commenting, which may be a good way to stimulate connections (as users will quickly see who other users are following), won't take long before it starts to interfere with the difficult signal to noise ratio that Twitter itself stuggles with.

I would probably be prepared to give Meme a temporary reprieve, however, if it were not for one thing... The fact that it has launched as an invite only beta. Spot the problem? Invite only betas are a great way to carry out a controlled launch whilst you iron out teething problems / get a handling on bandwidth costs / figure out a business model / boil the kettle, provided the service doesn't need critical mass to be useful. Gmail launched invite only - it didn't matter because you didn't need to know people who also used Gmail for it to be useful. Social networks on the other hand live or die by user numbers - I might use Facebook or LinkedIn because other people do, but if everyone left so would I - and if they weren't there in the first place (because they had to be 'invited') I might never have joined.

The end of the beginning for Google's Content Network?

Amidst all the excited talk of Spotify iPhone apps and Apple tablet devices this week you just might have missed some interesting news from our friends at Google (and no, I'm not referring to the fire in their London office)...

On Tuesday Google quietly announced on their AdSense blog that they plan to open up their Google Content Network to third party networks as a way to maximize advertising revenues for those publishers using AdSense as a revenue stream. For publishers this is definitely a boon but from Google's point of view this is a surprising move - on the one hand it will obviously generate incremental revenue as it effectively places a whole range of additional advertisers on the network without any work yet at the same time it weakens their position slightly. In effect they have taken some of that niche reach out into the long-tail that some of the other networks lacked and handed it straight over to them.  You could well ask then - given that any of these third party networks will have additional reach, why advertise on Google when you can simply advertise on one of these (yet to be announced) third-party networks?

In reality, as always, things are a little bit more complicated than that. Firstly publisher sites have to opt-in to these third party networks so Google won't exactly be handing over the keys to the kingdom. As an agency we would also generally point out Google's advantages, since their network gives advertisers complete transparency and control over where they appear, where conversions come from and what the costs are. This generally means that a well managed campaign on Google probably trumps a campaign run through a third-party network (at least in terms of like-for-like performance on the same sites). The networks also have the ever growing challenge of assuring quality environments for advertisers and this move certainly won't make IASH accreditation any easier to achieve.

What makes this move interesting though is that it positions Google one step closer to taking a role as an ad-exchange, since they are now able to broker out your advertising space much more widely (and obviously place ads too should you want).  As most other ad-exchanges seem to fail to effectively communicate their position this puts Google in a very strong position, particularly with their reach into the longtail... I can't help but wonder if the next move will be for them to flip this around on its head and open up the third party networks to advertisers for management through their interface.

3am and everyones asleep

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls- Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers. http://www.3am.co.uk/ What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky. Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like? Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6. Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth. Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear. To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about. But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Would you pay to read news online?

Rupert Murdoch seems to think that you will.

After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, possibly from as soon as next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It isn't clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.

It has been obvious for some time that the newspaper industry is at a crossroads. The old-new-model of drawing in as much traffic as possible to gain revenue from display advertising has been found to be unsustainable - I say old-new because, well, we've been here before haven't we: back when paid for content was deemed to be a broken model and the pay-walls tumbled down the first time. In addition to News Corp, the Telegraph, Guardian and Mirror Groups have all mooted charging for content but as Michael Beecroft, head of digital trading at Mediaedge:cia Global, concedes: "In many ways the horse has already bolted, and trying to close the door on it now will be very tricky indeed."

This model may work for some specialist content, such as the FT or the Media section of The Guardian, but in general why would anyone pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?

Murdoch, Sly Bailey and others speak about how quality journalism is not cheap but what exacly denotes "quality" and who is the judge of that other than the audience? In a world where the media landscape is increasingly fragmenting, why would you pay for frontline heavyweight news items when the BBC continue to provide that for (what is perceived to be) free? And when it comes to the so called celebrity ‘news' that the tabloids pedal so well, why would you pay for The Sun when you can go to Perez Hilton? Why go to newspapers for sport news when you can go to Cricinfo, Football 365 or Planet Rugby?

Even most of the content from the Guardian's Media section can also be found with a subscription to the NMA or Media Week.

Just last week, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired said in an interview to German news website Spiegel:

"In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money."

The UK has always had more national newspapers than any other country, and the arrival of digital has just exacerbated the situation to the point where the market is unbearably crowded.

The Independent, with the lowest readership of any national, has been under threat for some time following huge losses, with the Daily Mail & General Trust rumoured to be interested in rescuing it. The failure for such a move to materialize to date probably says more about The Independent that anything else.

Moreover, The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, published since 1791, is facing the threat of either closure by the Guardian Media Group or being re formatted into a weekly magazine following the same heavy losses suffered by the other papers (The Observor actually being one of the papers that is holding its weight better than others). I would find this extremely sad, no other Sunday paper quite caters for the same readership (though this may yet be its saving grace- Guardian Media Group is owned by a not-quite-for-profit organisation for a reason) but we all should come to the realization that in the next ten years a lot of household newspaper names will either change beyond recognition or disappear completely.

Ultimately we have been here before. People may be questioning the business model for free content but it is worth remembering that the model for paid content turned out to be just as unprofitable back at the turn of the decade.  The fundamental problem is that there is no longer a scarcity of content and without scarcity economics doesn't really work. One thing is for sure though - in the words of Dylan, These Times They Are A-Changin'.

To click or not to click....

Some hot debate about the importance, or not, of the click has been had this week. We've been mulling over why when no other advertising medium expects consumers to leave what they are happily doing in that moment to interact with a brand, online continues to value the click as the key sign of success. When you watch a TV ad you can still catch the second half of Coronation Street without the media agency or client feeling that the ad spot has been wasted. How then, within what is hailed as the most measurable of media channels, can we make sure we are measuring the right things?

This question and that of a "universal trading currency" are not new. Despite some important steps in the right direction, it seems as an industry we are still some way from agreeing a currency that allows us to trade and evaluate performance across all media channels with consistent definition of audiences and insight into impact.

While this topic inevitably rumbles on, we need to continue to work hard with clients to develop our understanding of digital channels in context - whether that be by using engagement mapping reports through the adservers to better allocate conversions to contributing channels, further integrating analytics data with marketing or ensuring brand studies include digital as a channel rather than an add on.

Alternatively we can follow Pringles lead and focus on clicks for kicks!

Can Amazon learn to stop worrying and love the twitterbomb?

So, Amazon won't pay commission to affiliates who use links within Twitter to drive traffic. Is this fair? Is their policy right?

There are many different ways of looking at this problem. Let's take a look at Amazon's position. They are paying commission to affiliates who drive new customers through to their site. As part of this process, they ask affiliates to agree to their terms & conditions of use and these, at least from a legal perspective state that the traffic is related to "Your Site", referring to where the traffic comes from.

So from a legal standpoint, they would appear to be operating as per these terms but how long ago were these written? Were social media and the likes of Twitter such a big issue when they were last updated? When you consider recent stories about Dell generating $1M of revenue through Twitter alerts, you can certainly see that the medium has grown up but perhaps not everyone has been in tune with this change.

The problem with the wording is that any smart affiliate could simply start redirecting traffic from Twitter (or other community sites) through their own short URL tool, sitting on their site and as such would be sending this traffic to Amazon. From a legal standpoint this would appear to meet their requirements but it still leaves an open question. Is Amazon happy about that type of traffic?

Affiliate marketers are often the folks that are able to spot an opportunity and take advantage of it much quicker than most brands. See a gap, code it, get it live at 2am. If someone on Twitter likes talking about rock music and inserts links to Amazon for the albums they are tweeting about, is that so dissimilar to if they had a blog and these comments were posted there? They seem pretty close to me.

From a brands perspective, they need to ensure that consumers aren't being spammed and that they only pay affiliates for genuine activity rather than having a cookie pool covering everyone in the country. But this is where working with your affiliates is key. Understand what they are doing and you'll be a little less nervous when something new appears.

Lawyers, time to update your affiliate terms and conditions to help your affiliates know exactly what you are happy paying for and what you aren't. Be upfront about it and they'll be a happier bunch, working on your behalf and ultimately driving revenue.

Flogging a dead horse

The last few weeks have seen polar opposites in terms of luck for Phorm, the personalisation technology company. On one hand it appears as though both BT and TalkTalk have put their plans to implement their technology on hold (I say on hold as apparently the contracts are still in place). Yet on the other, they received yet another cash injection of £15M to help support their trials in other markets.

The digital industry has long viewed Phorm with distain following the supposed illegal trials in the UK and it is these events that have tarnished the brand and opened up the discussion to the wider population. When the likes of the BBC and Guardian are talking about it, you know you've got a problem and it is almost certainly having a negative impact on public opinion towards behavioural targeting in general. The interesting element about their plans in other markets, specifically the Korean trial is that they've learnt from their mistakes and consumers are given the opportunity to opt-in from the start. To quote the press release (PDF link), "KT customers opting into the trial will not only benefit from existing features such as enhanced user privacy and more relevant advertising, but will also be invited to experience an innovative new consumer proposition...".

Now you would have expected them to learn from their mistakes in the UK but this change also risks undermining their whole product. With the service being opt-in, is the opportunity for some free software (which is hardly scarce and not particularly exciting) and more relevant ads going to be enough to convince consumers to sign up? Clearly the big telco's have a very strong position and if they put their marketing weight behind the trial then signups might not be an issue but from an advertiser's perspective being opt-in reduces the size of the audience and is also likely to be skewed to a certain demographic. Great if you want to target the naïve first time web user but not so good if you want to target professional consumers, especially those using mobile for a large proportion of their web use.

So, can Phorm survive? In the UK it looks as though they will find it very difficult to change public perception and rightly so, their brand has been tarnished and they are unlikely to now spend the money needed to change this view.  Even with the recent cash injection they need to work on their costs - Brand Republic recently revealed that Phorm have a burn rate of $1.8 million dollars a month, not great when you have no revenue streams whatsoever. However there are still another 194 countries in the world in which to run the service and it is likely to be this fact that has prompted investors to continue to inject money in the company. Why else would you continue to invest in a business that has received so much negative coverage?