The Affiliate industry lost one of it’s most loved veterans today.  Rexanne Mancini passed away leaving behind a ton of friends and an amazing family.  Rexanne was not only an industry veteran, but she was one of the very first Mommy Bloggers in the world with her first parenting site as an AOL site in the mid 90′s.

Adam and Rexanne

After finding success with her AOL website, she quickly bought a single word domain which for years remained a leading site in the Alexa 100K.  After launching her first successful site and domain, she eventually spread out and built off of that brand to develop a series of other similar sites that were around the same topics, but from different points of view.  Rexanne wrote from her heart and tried to teach parents about what she thought was right.  She gave advice which she believed in and always thought of her readers first.  In her real life she was all about having fun and helping other people.

If she would see someone standing by themselves at a show, she’d be the first one over to them asking them if they wanted a drink or saying hi.  She’d introduce people around the room and if she saw people arguing, she’d jump in and end it.  All of her life was about having fun and helping other people which is why everyone in the industry loved her.  She was the first person to give advice, always there if you needed to talk, and if you were hungry she’d be a mom and try to feed you.  She was an amazing person with a huge heart and someone that the entire Affiliate industry will miss.  Rexanne was an active member on ABestWeb and was always a huge supporter of helping to educate merchants on ethics and adware.

Rexanne could not stand watching as her own and other people’s commissions were getting stolen by toolbars and adware.  When NY passed the first Nexus tax law and Merchants began removing NY Affiliates, instead of just sitting by and watching her friends businesses fall apart, she began removing the Merchants that were removing NY Affiliates.  Rexanne would do anything for her friends and was someone that everyone loved to see.  She will be missed and I wish her family the best.

Though mobile marketing is the talk of the town recently, mobile video advertising has not exactly done as well as everyone has expected it to. As always, results vary, but most marketers have not been incredibly impressed with the performance that mobile video ads have brought for their brands or businesses. Plus, there is really only one way of advertising with videos on mobile platforms, and it is with the relatively new mobile pre-roll ads from companies like YouTube. YouTube gets all the recognition in the world when it comes to video advertising, but of course there are other options. Although not as popular as YouTube, there is a very new company called Showyou that has announced a partnership with the media agency called OMD, accompanied by a new advertising opportunity that changes mobile video marketing in a significant way.

Showyou and OMD are calling their collaboration a new form of “social video advertising.” Unlike the familiar pre-roll ads that are all over YouTube today, the new platform allows mobile video advertisers to place video ads alongside other content. The Showyou app advertising will function similar to the way that Sponsored Posts in Facebook News Feeds or Promoted Tweets do. In Showyou, there will be a list of 20 to 30 of the top videos being viewed by popularity, and among them, marketers will be able to place their video ads. It will be a great way for advertisers to place their video advertisements among the most popular videos, instead of the random placement that YouTube offers. Plus, all results will be genuine, as in order to view an ad a user must first click on it themselves. With YouTube, the ad is forced upon a viewer, and many of these ads are not viewed completely.

Michael Carney, a writer for the news website PandoDaily, wrote on the subject of the partnership and what it will bring;

By making everything opt-in, the company is taking a fairly user-friendly approach. Brands are following suit, according to Showyou founder and CEO Mark Hall, by trying to be creative and engaging, rather than just taking television commercials and uploading them for mobile consumption

As for the “when and where” of the partnership New York Times writer Tanzina Vega writes that

The partnership, which will begin this month, will run for a 90-day trial period. Depending on its success, Mr. Cohen said it “could mean a longer-term partnership with deeper relationships.”

Already, Showyou and OMD have been inviting brands to join in and in a way, test the success of the new mobile video marketing method. Some of these brands include Doritos, Monster, Brooks, Levi’s, Showtime, and Mountain Dew.

As a mobile video app, Showyou will surely be competing heavily with YouTube, but the two offer different features, so there will be user preferences between the two. Mobile video ads are still relatively new, so coming up with new marketing methods for them early in the game is a smart decision by Showyou and OMD. Now, we will just have to wait for some results from Showyou in the near future.

Ad4Game, already one of the biggest gaming performance advertising network has jut announced the launch of its new offer-based network. Until recently the network was  only paying on a CPM and charging clients on a performance basis, but with their growing market share they felt it was time to offer all of the gaming offers on a CPA.

They have developed their own technology to track it, focused completely on the download and signup of users on games.  According them, “All our gaming CPA offers simply require the visitor to fill in a simple signup form and confirm their email! Absolutely nothing else. There are no tricks, no surveys, no credit cards needed.”

One of the best parts of the network that it has offers from virtually hundreds of countries around the world, allowing people to promote to countries in which media would be almost free.  Additionally, they offer creative and landing pages in multiple languages.

You can sign up at http://www.ad4game.com/publisher.php

The two names that most people find are synonymous with social networking are Twitter and Facebook, and with good reason. They both have enormous user bases, and they have both been the main focus of those interested in social media marketing in recent months. During their time of fame, they have not been incredibly competitive with one another, but rather they have generally coexisted. However, no matter how hard two companies try to remain civil, there will always be one that has better numbers than the other. eMarketer has released their projections regarding which of the two companies will take the top spot in mobile marketing revenue for the remainder of this year.

The popular marketing insight and forecasting company puts their faith in Twitter for the rest of 2012. Here is their exact prediction:

Twitter will earn $129.7 million in mobile advertising revenues this year in the US, eMarketer projects. Facebook, which rolled out mobile ads for the first time this year, will come in at just over half that amount, at $72.7 million in the US.

The data shows, though, that both networks are growing in ad revenue. eMarketer attributes this growing revenue success to the respective mobile ad platforms for each company. Out of all mobile advertising platforms, the company has placed Google at over half of the total revenue for the period of 2011 to 2014. Their reason for Twitter being ahead of Facebook is that Facebook’s mobile ad campaign is still young. They still have high hopes for Facebook, though, stating:

Still, mobile is a long-term play for Facebook, and by next year, eMarketer expects the social networking giant to beat out Twitter by a significant margin, taking in $387 million on mobile in the US. By 2014, Facebook’s US mobile revenues will reach $629.4 million, compared to $444.1 million at Twitter—making Facebook the second-highest mobile ad earner of all companies after Google, which has a significant lead.

So, as of right now, it is expected that Twitter will prevail in mobile marketing revenue for the remainder of 2012. eMarketer sees Facebook making a significant comeback once their mobile marketing platform gets more up to speed with Twitter, since Facebook has gotten very decent results with their marketing efforts in the past. For now, Facebook will continue to be behind Twitter, Google, and even Apple’s iAd platform in  mobile ad revenue, but there will be a full recovery in the future.

The results that eMarketer came to were based off of information from all over the web. After reading analysis reports and reported total revenues of the many ad platforms, they came to their results.

eMarketer’s estimate for overall US mobile advertising spending in 2012 is unchanged from the previous forecast. This is eMarketer’s first forecast for mobile advertising revenue at Twitter, Facebook and Pandora.

Bing recently chose a very interesting way of figuring out just how relevant they are in the world of search engines. It was also a decent way of promoting their search engine, especially since the results of their little test came out in their favor. Since Bing came to be, a lot of people have still chosen Google to fulfill their search engine needs. Google seems to have been around since the very beginning of the internet, so people have become quite comfortable with the company, but Bing has a lot to offer that many people have given themselves a chance to recognize.

Bing, having quite a bit of confidence in their search engine, put themselves right up against the biggest name in search engines, testing just who can give people the better results. The conducted a test with 1,000 search engine users over the age of 18, asking them to type the same search query into both Google and Bing and see which results they preferred. After fives searches, the respondents were asked to average out the results from each search, and find which search engine they seemed to prefer. Basically, Bing made these people that were surveyed prove that internet users were not giving Bing the chance that it deserved.

When the results were tallied, the outcome was clear – people chose Bing web search results over Google nearly 2:1 in the blind comparison tests. Specifically, of the nearly 1000 participants: 57.4% chose Bing more often, 30.2% chose Google more often; 12.4 % resulted in a draw.

Bing then wrote in their blog post,

Why did we think a blind comparison test of the pure web search results would be valuable? Because it is the best way to really test the quality of web search results where the majority of clicks occur – without the influence of the ingrained, habitual impact of the Google brand. Now you know there is a better alternative to Google.

This test seems like one of the best decisions that Bing has made, especially since the results are already being spewed all over Twitter. Bing will absolutely be seeing more traffic to their search engine due to this test. It was a form of proof to the public, as well as a way to market their search engine. Somebody over at the Bing headquarters has some great ideas.

The study was not conducted by Bing, but it was conducted by an independent research company called Answers Research for Bing’s benefit. This study just shows that people should start using Bing, and that Google, though it may seem like some sort of internet overlord, may not have all the answers, or the best ones. With 2 to 1 results in the test, it is clear that Bing brings something to the table, and a bit more focus should be put on the company. Who knows; they may just end up with the same or better results than Google’s search engine someday.

(Press Release) NEW YORK CITY – September 5, 2012- Rakuten LinkShare today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire mediaFORGE, a Utah-based dynamic display media company. Founded in 2009, mediaFORGE’s Consumer Engagement display platform provides online advertisers with a unique way to prospect, retarget, nurture, and engage customers to help drive higher conversion. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rakuten LinkShare is acquiring mediaFORGE to add to its portfolio of affiliate marketing, search marketing and lead generation services and solutions. The company is expanding its offerings through the mediaFORGE acquisition to help online retailers drive multi-channel, integrated campaigns.

mediaFORGE is the only display advertising and retargeting company that bases its business model on Consumer Engagement, aligning its goals with advertisers’ goals by using a metric that measurably increases site conversions. As a result, clients get highly detailed analytics capabilities that offer online retailers and other companies a powerful tool for discovering actionable insights to achieve online marketing objectives.

Rakuten LinkShare’s global network will enable mediaFORGE to accelerate its expansion and reach throughout the US, Canada, the UK, and Japan. Long term the two companies will work together along with advertisers and publishers to identify multi-channel synergies and technical integration opportunities that will create value within today’s dynamic online advertising landscape.

Strong demand for display related services have recently been reported as advertising industry revenues continue to climb. In April 2012, the IAB reported that 2011 display related advertising revenues totaled $11.1 billion, representing an increase of 15 percent over 2010.[1]

“We welcome mediaFORGE to the Rakuten LinkShare family of services and solutions. Their unique Consumer Engagement advertising model presents a compelling value proposition to our network of global advertisers,” said Yaz Iida, chief executive officer, Rakuten LinkShare. “As we build a powerful, strategic portfolio of online marketing services that go beyond affiliate marketing, mediaFORGE complements our approach with a proven display and retargeting solution to help advertisers maximize their online investments while providing a personalized shopping experience for consumers.”

Advertisers searching for additional ways to drive sales using the cost-per-action (CPA) model will find the two companies aligned when it comes to pricing. The mediaFORGE pricing model is based on conversions attributed to Consumer Engagement while Rakuten LinkShare affiliate marketing has long been an industry leader in performance marketing.

“We founded mediaFORGE to address the growing need of online advertisers to optimize campaigns for performance, foster Consumer Engagement, and drive higher conversion while delivering a reliable return on ad spend,” said Tony Zito, chief executive officer of mediaFORGE. “This strategy will remain the same as mediaFORGE joins the Rakuten LinkShare portfolio of services. What changes is that our potential to reach more advertisers with our Consumer Engagement display model has grown exponentially as we make plans to expand our business around the world.”

mediaFORGE currently employs approximately 50 people, all of whom will remain with the company. The name of the company will remain mediaFORGE and the company headquarters, development, and business operations will remain in Salt Lake City. The deal is expected to close later in 2012.