Ebay have now launched their own Social News site to highlight the weird and wonderful best items for sale on Ebay, past and present.

What is strange is that it doesn’t appear on their community “sneak peek” though it is still in beta.

There also doesn’t appear to be any mention of it on the Ebay blog.

How much traffic a site like this could drive really depends on how much Ebay decide to promote it, but it if you are a regular on Ebay, it might be a good idea to invest a little time in building up both your profile and those of your products.

Valleywag was a little critical, saying they are copying Digg and Craigslist but considering Ebay already own Stumbleupon, this was a logical direction to take.
I wonder if they might integrate the 2 in some way, allowing you to Stumble the Best of Ebay.

Shoemoney Media and Mediawhiz (The parent company of Text Link Ads and ReviewMe) have released an innovative new monetization model, based upon Ebay Auctions – AuctionAds.com

Mainstream media will no doubt not even think let alone write about the 2 core advantages of this system for a large segment of the affiliate marketplace.

1. International – Even affiliates in the UK were unable to join the Ebay affiliate program in the US
2. Payment – Payment is made by Paypal rather than check, with a $10 threshold

International Affiliates

If you are an affiliate based in the US, almost all affiliate marketing doors are open. If you live anywhere else, or if your company is registered somewhere else, you ultimately always hit barriers for your participation.

Ebay International Affiliate Barriers

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay (US) Affiliates FAQ

The Ebay affiliate program is managed by Commission Junction, who provide an international affiliate management system.
Unfortunately Ebay has chosen to separate their affiliate program by territory, at least for some.
Affiliates based in the US can join the affiliate program of other counties, affiliates outside the US cannot join the US program… one day the European Union might decide that is not free trade.

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay UK Affiliate FAQ:-

It is not Commission Junctions fault, they provide an international platform, although it is confusing for affiliates to identify which affiliate programs they are entitled to join.

International Payment

With Paypal being offered there are several advantages

• Low $10 payment threshold
• No excessive charges for processing international checks
• No delays in cashflow (though it is not specified how quickly AuctionAds will pay)

This might not be a universal advantage for all affiliates, because Commission Junction do offer direct bank transfers in a number of territories. A lot will depend on how AuctionAds calculate when a payment is due.
If their system allows for them to make payments faster than Commission Junction, that is a significant advantage.

There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because our affiliate program is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed and signs up for our service you earn a bonus 2% of all revenue generated by that user for the 6 months.

You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Ebay With TradeDoubler

I noticed that the affiliate program for Ebay.pl is actually handled via TradeDoubler – I don’t currently publish any sites in Polish, but that might be something I will look into for some of my future publishing – maybe their Ebay interface is more “International Friendly”.
I do know that the payment threshold quoted was 150 zloty – $50 USD which is far higher than the $10 Threshold offered by AuctionAds.

If TradeDoubler doesn’t provide global Geo-targetting, it would only be suitable for non-English language sites, at least compared to AuctionAds.

Other Advantages of Auction Ads

What is the advantage over CJ/eBay direct affiliation?

Easy implementation and the leverage of AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and our ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own affiliate relationship.

I have niche websites which receive 90% US traffic, but I have never been able to offer Ebay as an alternative sales channel. Whilst I have been able to use Chitika adverts, and have included affiliate links through mainly Linkshare, Ebay quite often was offering much better deals for the products my visitors wanted to buy.

Being able to offer the best deals and make money from doing so is always the best option for affiliates.

Live AuctionAds Examples

So here are some example “live” adverts – no screenhots you will have to click through if reading this in an RSS Reader.

Keyword: Blogging

Keyword: Internet Marketing

Keyword: Gardening and “Mole trap”

Feature Suggestions

• Keyword Targetting – very much like Chitika, a very specific product related keyword seems to be the best option currently. I am not actually sure it would be an advantage to offer contextual or based on several keywords. I did try comma delimited keywords and they didn’t seem to work. Maybe category + keyword would be a good alternative.
• Remove Ads By AuctionAds – if you wanted to place 3 half-banners vertically because that suited your layout, the AuctionAds link in each of them would be inappropriate. Alternatively provide multiple image alignment options – also allow the colour to be changed
• RSS Feeds – I would love to be able to use an RSS feed of the adverts, that I could then use to style in whatever way I choose.
• Direct Affiliate Link – Please provide a direct affiliate link – I missed the link in the interface which is under Account Home.
• Pay Per Click – It would be great if AuctionAds in some way to provide a bridge for international affiliates to advertise Ebay products in the US market via PPC
• auctionads_ad_client – for the tin-foil hat brigade, there needs to be a way of generating multiple values for every niche website. Maybe you can do a deal with Google Yahoo and MSN so these don’t appear in search results, but that isn’t total anonymity.
• Campaigns – Ability to create a campaign on the fly, or at least while you are creating code – this is possible using the wizard, but it seems you have 3 seperate processes currently, and it should be possible to have just one.
• Presets – the ability to save a preset for colour selection, and maybe retain a complete history of ads already created for different campaigns.
• Live Results – Currently the number of results are displayed using Ajax, it would be good to be able to preview them
• Hide Campaign ID – The ability to have none human readable campaign identification (this seems to have been added while I was writing) – I would love to be able to assign my own (as above, campaigns on-the-fly)

Take A Look For Yourself

I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge.

Where is the link? At the bottom of the example ads or just click here.

Further Discussion

Actually very few sites so far have picked this up, so I will add links as I see them

Techcrunch seems to be first with the news – they are thinking about giving it a test run on their more product related sites. The advantage AuctionAds for them is that it is Geo-targetted – AuctionAds handle the backend merging of multiple affiliate programs.

Linda at 5 Star Affiliates so far has what she admits to being a short writeup, but she has spotted that sometimes the auction items are expired. She has also managed to hack an affiliate referral ID, which I will have to take a look at doing as well.

Update on AuctionAds

Darren emphasised that AuctionAds is very much a network that will work best with product focused sites. He says he has also had a chance to have a look at the backend – I am not sure that is behind the scenes of what a normal publisher sees, but Mediawhiz normally put together fairly solid services, and I am sure Shoemoney’s team have the security under control.

John Chow also did an in-depth review of of AuctionAds explaining how the payment system works for normal Ebay affiliates in great depth, and also how he intends to use the adverts on his product reviews sites.

Ajay has knocked together some code for making AuctionAds to a certain extent “contextual”, either using UTW or SimpleTags Data.
I don’t think this approach is ideal currently, because I have had a chance to exchange emails with Ddn and currently the widget uses keywords supplied randomly rather than in priority order, unlike Chitika which uses a priority scale. This is something that will be fixed in the near future.

This is important, take for instance this example (though unlikely a good example for Ebay content)

wordpress theme, wordpress, blogging

If these were used randomly, you would probably end up with more adverts which used the keyword blogging, and you might end up with Britney Spears T-shirts or other celebrity stuff. The adverts are often being optimised based on which adverts will finish soon.

If they are taken in priority order then this is ideal, and you could use

barcode number, camera model, camera manufacturer, camera type, photography

For many blogs, using a mixture of custom fields and categories might prove better for targetting, because they can be listed in a specific order. UTW allows tags to be displayed in popularity order, so maybe that could be reversed to achieve almost the same thing.

It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.

The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.

In all those 5 years, I haven’t heard anyone suggest that Yahoo should use “nofollow” for all the directory listings. All commercial websites don’t have a free option to get listed.

It is widely believed that a Yahoo directory listing is given a significant search engine weight.

Commercial Internet

Big business has a huge advantage over the little guy on the internet. Lets take Ebay as an example.

Many shoppers wouldn’t realise it, although the relationship is made very clear, that Epinions.com is owned by Shopping.com, which is itself owned by Ebay.com.
There is lots of interlinking between the different sites, though it could be achieved in a much more search engine friendly way. There is certainly no clear notification by every link that money is being made on every purchase.

Whilst reviews are user generated, there is certainly editorial control over which products are positioned prominently to maximise sales.

2006 in Perspective

Bloggers have been victimising PPP and to a lesser extent Reviewme.

Google, who claim to “do no evil” are actively discouraging paid posts and paid links from small services. They are suggesting that “nofollow” should be used to denote paid links, rather than their previous intent, untrusted sites (for various reasons).

Google unfortunately made paid links from Yahoo “saintly” since the beginning of their existence. It is only $300 and Yahoo receive payment even if they don’t include your site.
Google don’t regulate major corporations from cross-linking commercially.

During 2006 I have seen Google likened to God.

2007 A Reality Check?

My hope is that bloggers come down to earth a little, because the ranting and raving about paid posts is really displaying quite clearly how narrow-minded they are.

Paid posts and paid links give the little guy a chance to make some money writing about and linking to relevant content. They give the site linked to a greater chance of competing with the massive corporate machines as well as valuable feedback.

There is recent news that PayPerPost have acquired Performancing metrics. Nick at Performancing can be blunt, crude and highly opinionated. He is also a damn smart and ethical guy.
If you have been listening to his recent podcasts, you would know that he has been looking for someone to take metrics onboard for quite some time, as it was a money sink, and he was also talking to VC Dan Rua.
I have mentioned in the past that I have nothing but respect for the PPP guys. The PPP guys didn’t create any scandal, bloggers did it themselves. PayPerPost didn’t object to the free publicity, but in all the comments I have seen made by PPP guys in response to huge amounts of criticism, they have made some quite compelling counter arguments, and taken any criticism as genuine feedback.

I have seen people suggesting that they are going to be immediately cancelling their Performancing metrics accounts for ethical reasons.
Almost every advertiser and affiliate network you work with on your sites is gathering data. PayPerPost seem to have some smart guys backing them with VC funding.

PayPerPost are a business. With VCs backing them, they are not going to take risks in regard to personal data.

Why should PPP be compelled to enforce disclosure when Yahoo doesn’t proclaim “These are paid links?”

From what I have seen of PPP opportunities, they are in the main not for product reviews. It is quite possible they would be totally unaffected by the recent FTC / WOMMA discussion.

Create Great Content and Links Will Follow?

Give it time… maybe. Most websites don’t attract a lot of natural linkage. You can get a few links from various directories for free, though many more require payment – paid links are evil remember?

You can also gain lots of links from things like article marketing or press releases.

But that isn’t the natural linking Google say you should be looking for, to your great content, though I suppose a few sites pick up articles and press releases manually, most collect them automatically based by category of keyword searches.

# natural links per post = blog readership / 1000

That is a very rough figure because many blogs gain far more links, and many gain far less.

Techcrunch doesn’t gain 140 links for every post they make, and I gain more than one link on average for every 5 posts. Then again a large number of the links I gain are from splogs picking up tags used on Technorati.
There seems to be a critical mass for the number of links a single post can expect to receive unless it is exceptional linkbait.

Pay For Your Traffic

You can pay Google $0.15 for some traffic. If 1 in 1000 visitors decides to link to you then that link cost you $150. Hopefully you can convert some of the traffic into customers or subscribers because otherwise that is a horrendous cost, paid to Google as an alternative to natural search.

Who gains more money if paid links and sponsored content is condemned?

Trust and Duplicate Content

Linking through to someone is most of the time a statement of trust. You are sharing your visitors, subscribers, and maybe your customers with the other site. If you link through to them it should always be a followable link, unless you don’t trust them.

Google recommend always linking through to the original source if you syndicate content so they can determine the origin. The same would be true for any quotations. If you quote anything from a site, you should thus always use a followable link.

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.