Anyway the implementation is broken for average users

This is what the interface looks like

Seems very simple

1. You search for something
2. Click buttons
3. Code is inserted into your post

Perfect… not!

Average Users

An average blogger blogspot user will see

This as a nice text link

Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)

This as a nice image link

This as a nice text with image

Update: it doesn’t get stripped out the same way with WordPress but leaving it “broken” here anyway (in the feed)

Oops!

If your readers are reading from an RSS Feed that nice text with image gets stripped out, and the same would be true of emails created from an RSS feed.

This is just the same as happens with Javascript, which is why Google had to implement Adsense in a different way for RSS feeds. Amazon & Google need to do the same for Amazon ads, or use an alternative method such as flash embeds.

This is the code they currently insert

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=freeadver0cef-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0015T963C&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-right:10px;" align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Which is meant to appear like this

Blogger & Amazon should really get rid of the link+image option, or code it in such a way that something appears in the RSS feeds, even if it is just a link back to the permalink of the post to suggest clicking through – better would be a dynamic image which Google certainly know how to create for Adsense for Feeds.
At a minimum tell bloggers that it won’t appear in feeds and they might need to include alternatives of their own.

If you see someone using this code on Blogger / Blogspot, warn them about this as it might be costing them revenue

You can link to this post with the following code

<a href="http://andybeard.eu/2609/amazon-blogger.html">Warning: Amazon Blogger Integration Broken</a>

Update: hopefully code fixed in my RSS feed

Update 2

I have just received this comment from Rick Klau formerly of Feedbirner and now Program Manager for Blogger

Andy – you make a valid point, namely that if a large number of your readers read via feeds, then the iframe will not render in the feed reader. But “broken”? This is how Amazon’s Associates program has worked from day 1. That is, these are the same options an Associate has had from Amazon directly for incorporating Amazon links into their content. And it’s not at all hard for the blogger to insert a link (or image) independently of the iframe so that it will show in the feed.

–Rick Klau
Blogger PM

I have major problems with this logic

Google have their own very well known Adsense product – it is javascript based either direct calls or in the case of Adsense for search, divs which are replaced on page load using javascript.

For years it was known that you couldn’t include Adsense within the body of blog posts unless it was limited to only display on a blog, and not within a feed. WordPress has lots of special plugins for inserting Adsense code specifically to address this problem.

On Blogspot you don’t have that option with Adsense, you have 2 options for Adsense

• Within template areas, which can include at the top or bottom of a post, but not within the actual content, in the sidebar etc
• Special Adsense for feeds via Feedburner which is image based, as was Feedburners own feed monetization platform before it was purchased by Google 2 years ago.

A button to insert Adsense within post content would be broken functionality, but in some ways the Amazon integration is worse.
Adsense is never the focal point of a blog post, in fact you are not allowed to encourage people to click Adsense.

If someone was writing a book review, they would want to include an image and/or link to Amazon to hopefully make some money. If they chose the link+picture option, anyone reading from a shared review isn’t going to even see a link to buy something, or even that there is one on the page if they click through to the blog.
This is not only when the content appears on Blogger, but when it gets reposted maybe to Facebook, other syndication, shared with friends, in emails etc.

Blogger is mass market – the average blogger user wouldn’t have a clue that when they inserted an Iframe within a post, it wouldn’t appear within the feeds and emails.

Anything that works contrary to what an average user might expect is broken and either needs to work a different way, or to have the functionality limitations explained clearly in the interface.

I think Janet was the first to break the news of the Overstock changes

This is a story that both Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs and Shawn’s Affiliate Blog have been covering in depth.

The New York Times also has coverage and been giving out some great links.

Techcrunch has a Scribd copy of the original Overstock posted letter (Shawn posted the email)

The New York Times reports that

Linda is also reporting that this may soon affect California as well (there are lots of affiliates in California, they like the beaches)

On the good side, this may soon affect our good friend Jason Calacanis, who as a new affiliate I am sure was hoping to make some money from reputable sites such as Overstock.

The Times reports this will affect large affiliates in New York such as NextJump, Jellyfish and Entertainment Publishing, the unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp that prints discount coupon books.

So Why The Google Tax Headline?

This isn’t specific to Google, it could be any website advertising.

Google have a referrals program for various products

If you run Google Adsense on your blog, you are in many ways an affiliate of Google’s advertising program, you are selling traffic on their behalf.

So Where Would It Be Taxed?

Lots and lots of options

• California – Google’s primary location
• Where the servers are located
• Anywhere Google has a physical presence (everywhere?)
• The location of the company buying the advertising
• The location of the servers of the company buying the advertising
• The location of the person clicking an advert, or maybe the proxy server, or the company that is billed to
• The location of the publisher displaying the ads

Adwords advertisers in the EU have paid VAT since 2003 – I believe there is something similar in Taiwan
Adsense publishers in the EU if required can issue Google with a VAT invoice

As far as I am aware, no sales tax is charged in the US at any point in the chain.

As soon as you start down the rabbit hole of online business, the lines get blurred

The general rule in the US, as far as I can determine is that if you have a business presence in a state, you have to pay tax there. This applies if you own your own servers in the sate, or if you have employees.

Thus it might be beneficial for me, living in Europe to only rent servers, and to avoid hiring someone from the US as a full-time employee.

The New Law Amazon Is Fighting Affects All Affiliates

The chances are if you have an affiliate program, that at least one of your affiliates is based in the New York area.

If the logic Amazon is using is correct then anyone with an affiliate program is going to have to pay tax in NY, even if a sale is made though an affiliate link owned by a non-NY resident.

Impossible To Determine If Affiliate Has NY Presence

Whilst it is possible to limit an affiliate program to only affiliates from outside New York, it would be extremely hard to police.

An affiliate themselves could have employees in NY, or run servers there.

Can of Worms

Ultimately it seems to me the only fair way to handle things is an all or nothing approach. Tax all internet sales or none of them to New York residents.

If you run an affiliate program yourself, it might be time to consult your tax and legal advisors.

For more in depth coverage from a couple of weeks ago please refer to:-

Revenews
Internet Retailer
5 Star Affiliates Programs
Internet News

Sure it is easy to earn yourself a quick $40 or whatever by promoting it, by dropping text links all over the place such as this one:-
Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Or you can use some other creatives such as a nice sidebar widget (might not show in a feed reader)

Amazon’s Success Is At Least In Part Their Affiliate Program

For years affiliates have been driving traffic to Amazon. They don’t get the benefit of recurring or lifetime commissions, the affiliate program is effectively make a sale on the visit or get nothing, but because the products were mass market, some people made a fair amount of money from Amazon, and many still do.

Will Kindle Kill Affiliate Sales Of Books?

If it is successful, it could certainly have an effect.

People who buy Kindle will be the mass consumers of information, the people who buy a lot of books, especially people who have taken training to read faster such as I did at Rich Schefren’s Acceleration 2 Seminar, assuming Kindle has the features to allow faster reading.

These aren’t your “one book for Christmas” types, these are people who buy 20 books because they are going on a trip somewhere, or researching a specific topic over a few days.

Kindle Is A Direct To Amazon Sales Cycle

Amazon is cutting out the middle man. Just because you might make a $40 sale now, those people who buy the device for $400 are quite possibly no longer going to generate affiliate revenue.

It is quite possible that such people go to Amazon direct, but they are also the kind that might be influenced by a review of one book somewhere on the web, go to Amazon following an affiliate link, and buy 20 related books.

I have been monitoring the discussion around Kindle, I know Robert Scoble has mentioned making money from people reading his blog on Kindle (30% ?) but that seems like it might be only a select few. We are not going to see “Subscribe On Kindle” buttons on the vast majority of blogs any time soon.

• I would have expected Amazon to provide a lot more information on Kindle to Affiliates and what it means to them if there was a money making opportunity (not just selling the device).
• I would expect residual earnings for selling a device which will provide a residual income for Amazon.

How does this launch affect other players in the ebook market such as Clickbank?

I keep reasonably close tabs on the affiliate marketing industry, and I haven’t seen anyone rejoicing the introduction of Kindle. Have I missed something?

The culprit is TwitThis, that seems to be using Amazon S3 to store images.

Here is the standard TwitThis code:-

<!-- Begin TwitThis (http://twitthis.com/) -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.scripts/twitthis.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="javascript:;" onclick="TwitThis.pop();"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/twitthis_grey_72x221.gif" alt="TwitThis" style="border:none;" /></a>');
//-->
</script>
<!-- /End -->

What you need to do is host the TwitThis logo on your own server to speed things up.
Here is the image used that you can save to your harddisk and then upload to WordPress or other blogging platform.

Then all you need to do is insert it into the code

In my case this is what I am using

<!-- Begin TwitThis (http://twitthis.com/) -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.scripts/twitthis.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="javascript:;" onclick="TwitThis.pop();"><img src="http://ndybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/twitthis_grey_72x22.gif" alt="TwitThis" style="border:none;" /></a>');
//-->
</script>
<!-- /End -->

Actually I have listed a broken URL above, I don’t want people just copying the code and trying to use the image from my server.

As an alternative to the TwitThis button, Jemmille has created a modified version of my hacked Sociable plugin Antisocial that includes a “TwitThis” button, and a fix to StumbleUpon.
I will probably update my distribution with Jemmille’s code in a few days, but you can get it directly for now.

Update: This wasn’t a total fix because the Javascript was still being loaded from Amazon S3 and was causing horrendous page load times. TwitThis has been removed until I can hack a version that doesn’t use javascript.

Take a look at this page (well I hope the link continues to display the problem)

The first problem isn’t immediately obvious, but take a look at this screenshot

The blogger wrote a nice announcement post about Amazon Contextual links, and included a link through to Amazon to read more.

Amazon decided to hijack the link with an advert – that is really bad news, and could be looked on unethical if it wasn’t for the beta badge on the service.

The second problem is just as bad, script compatibility.

You are not going to get many sales if a potential customer is greeted with the following message.

Frightening isn’t it?

Viable Alternatives (that actually work)

This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list

• PPC such as Konterra
• ContextCash
• Alinks WordPress Plugin

I would highly suggest not using Amazon Contextual Links until it works reliably.

I am going to try including the code in just this post as a test with their exact product matching (using the Adsense Deluxe plugin)

The Long Tail (Great book about keyword research>
Naked Conversations (Robert Scoble & Shel Israel on Blogging)
Harry Potter DVD
Karma Sutra ( heh ;) )

Update: The code is included on any page that this post appears on, but nothing seems to appear currently. I have switched to the version of the code that is not fixed to a particular product. Maybe it is a cache problem.

You might well have read on Jensense about the changes in the contextual advertising policy that confirmed my understanding of the policy that I wrote about 2 days ago.

As I stated in the comments in that post, I also contacted Google directly but I asked multiple questions. I had to use the email route not having a direct line to decision makers at Google, but Google have been fairly prompt in replying to my questions.

The short version of the questions I asked were

1. Use of Adsense Backgrounds
2. Context with Chitika
3. Search on Chitika
4. Placement of a Chitika eMiniMal that contains images next to an Adsense rectangle

Here is the longer version

Questions to Google Adsense Team

I have 2 questions in relation to currently policy changes with the Adsense content network

1. On one of my sites I have been experimenting with the use of Adsense “Backgrounds” to make the adverts more attractive.

Examples of the backgrounds are to be found here

http://adsensebackgrounds.com/

The site I am testing on is http://wpplugins.info

Are such backgrounds still compliant with the Adsense ToS and Policy Statements?

To be honest [snip] not relevant financial stuff [/snip]

2. With the recent policy change, I noted that Google do not want to encourage use of advertising that looks similar to that of Google.

At the same time it seems Google might be slightly more relaxed on advertising that doesn’t look like Adsense.

As an example Chitika adverts.

In the past it was noted that it was probably ok to use Chitika in conjunction with selected keywords.

In the new policy statement there was no mention of contextual advertising, though the current terms of service do mention contextual.

Can this be taken to mean that it is now possible to use contextual advertising with Chitka adverts that do not look like Adsense adverts, such as their eMinimals?

http://chitika.com/mm_overview.php

Also in regard to search, the Chitika eMinimal search is a product search. Is it now allowable to enable search on eMinimals on sites that contain Adsense for Search?

Would it be allowable to place an Eminimal, that contains an image, next to an Adsense rectangle?

There are actually 4 questions, but 2 topics – I am sure things like that happen to everyone ;)

Here is the reply I received

Reply from Google Adsense Team

With regards to your first question – we do not prohibit the use of CSS in conjunction with Google ads, as long as the ad code itself is not modified. However, we’d ask that publishers use their judgement and avoid implementations which may be deceptive or confusing to users.

Regarding your second question – AdSense publishers may display ads from other contextual ad networks on the same page as Google ads only if the formatting or color scheme of these ads is sufficiently different from the layout of the Google ads. In other words, if you choose to place
non-Google ads on the same site or page as Google ads, it should always be clear to the user that the ads are served by different advertising networks and that the non-Google ads have no association with Google. If the formats are naturally similar, we’d ask that you use different color
schemes for the competing ads.

Please note that as per our program policies, publishers may not place images near their AdSense ads in a way that suggests a relationship. Such an implementation may confuse users who assume that the image is directly related to the advertiser’s offerings. As a result, if you’d like to
display an eMiniMall ad which contains an image, please do not place it near your Google ads.

I am tempted to stick an affiliate link on this page for Adsense Backgrounds, as they seem to be a very good way of complying with the new Guidelines and still making your Google advertising eyecatching. I will stick a banner at the bottom of this post ;)

The key to this is “suggests a relationship”

I was also interested in the term “confusing users” – in some ways blending is confusing users and Google might start discouraging that practice.

Things like bullet points might still be a problem, but a decorative frame of some kind as I use on http://wpplugins.info seems to be ok, though I chose very plain – tasteful backgrounds there.

It is very important to note the placement instructions. Don’t go placing adverts from competing advertising systems alongside Google ads if they have pictures, and make them as distinct as possible.
You can probably use them vertically aligned, even if contextual, but avoid using 2 rectangles side-by-side if one is from a competitor.

I have asked a follow-up question regarding search boxes as that wasn’t covered in the first reply

Adsense for Search – Followup Question

Thanks for the very clear explanation. I am glad my interpretation of the rules was correct.

One part that you didn’t cover was search boxes from affiliate networks that look totally different to a Google search box.

If the search box looks totally different, is that allowed.

As an example, in the past it was always recommended to disable the search on the Chitika MiniMals on any site using Adsense for Search.

It seems to me that based upon the new policy, it would no longer be necessary to disable the search on Chitika or maybe Amazon search, as long as they are not similar.

I really look forward to your answer and thank you for your time.

Update:

Google Adsense for Search With A Competing Search Box

I am impressed, this reply came back in just a couple of hours, on a Friday evening

This one addresses my question regarding the search boxes.

I’m happy to help – I apologize for not addressing your search question. Yes, as long as your search box does not mimic the AdSense for search box in appearance, then you may place it on the same page.

Google are being extremely clear with their information, maybe a policy change? They know who their biggest competitors are in text based advertising, and seem to be just concentrating on their biggest rivals.

One question that still springs to mind is if you have pictures switched on for Adsense, with a 468×60 banner, and another provider is also serving banners.
468×60 it a little hard not to confuse formats between Google and someone else.

Update2:

Google and Competing Text Adverts

I am going to add some links to additional direct quotes from Googlr. It seems lots of people have been sending Google emails, and they are being very clear in their answers.

Eric Lander has been directly in contact with Google, and has a very clear email reply discussing how you might be able to use even text based competing adverts, as long as you are ensuring they look totally different.
I only came across Erics site in MyBlogLog, and he has some extremely useful content.

It seems if you stick a nice border around one of them, or make sure that they never display in the same color, you are in the clear. It is a little tough on colour split testing, especially automated, but I think people can live with that.

I am happy about being able to go full contextual on many ad networks, and I am sure Chitika and Amazon are very happy with the news, among others.

I am not a lawyer, thus any interpretation of the situation I am going to leave in the hands of lawyers who I have a great deal of respect for, and who themselves are involved in the internet marketing field.

First of all the “opinion” from the FTC (PDF LINK)

For some reason I read Darren’s post today before Brian’s (who is a lawyer) – there is some interesting discussion in both threads.

I then read Dr. Tony Hung’s opinion (he is a Dr of medicine) but the opinions are very valid.

Mike Young is a lawyer, specializing in internet law and wrote about this topic yesterday on the Copywriters Blog, his internet law blog, and there is further discussion on the copywriters board.

Other mentions I haven’t fully digested yet

FTC May Regulate Pay Per Post @ Techcrunch – The Techcrunch post targets Pay Per Post, which in my opinion is actually totally missing out on the much target picture. It also affects many of the companies Techcrunch cover who use affiliate programs for monetization.
FTC tells PayPerPost to knock it off at Matthew Ingram – Matthew does mention affiliate marketing, thus why target PPP with this. This affects Google more than PPP.

This affects Amazon, Google, Ebay, Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare and a host of other billion dollar companies that allow affiliates to link directly through to a particular product or service.

For WordPress users, the perfect solution is my Disclosure Policy Plugin.