Affiliate attribution is a concept which has been discussed for several years within the performance marketing community. It is an affiliate model which spreads the commission out to each affiliate involved in generating a commission, rather than paying the entire commission to the last affiliate before the sale. For example, if I am looking to … Read more
A new Penguin update from Google has been confirmed. Known as Penguin 5 to most in the search community, or Penguin 2.1 according to Google. Google’s head of search engine spam, Matt Cutts, confirmed this update via a tweet which read: Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree. More info … Read more
Everyone has been talking about the partial government shutdown in the US, and how it is affecting a wide range of companies, whole industries and, of course, individual citizens. In addition to that, however, the government shutdown could also have some pretty significant impacts on marketers and their SEO efforts. Of course, at this point … Read more
According to a study done by Freakonomics.com, the claims in the large-scale marketing campaign run by Bing.com saying “people prefer Bing over Google nearly 2:1” are misleading, if not outright false. Microsoft’s search engine, “Bing” has been running a campaign known as “Bing-It-On” for over a year now. In the campaign they challenge people to … Read more
Judge Lucy Koh (made semi-famous for asking an Apple lawyer if he was smoking crack during the Apple v Samsung patent case) has released a 43 page order which essentially boils down to allowing the two law suits alleging Google is performing illegal methods of gathering information. The case specifically targets the fact that Google … Read more
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been a law in the United States since 1996. The law includes a wide range of different rules and regulations, especially concerning requirements on keeping patient information private. Storing and transmitting patient information is very regulated, which limits the options doctors, insurance companies and other people … Read more
Facebook has confirmed that they are making another attempt to break into the very lucrative mobile advertising market. They have tried running ad networks using the massive amounts of data they have on millions of users before, with little success. They ran ads on the social gaming site of Zynga, and then last September they … Read more
ActiveCast Media has filed a lawsuit against Google in US court last week. They are suing Google for a breach of contract. The claim says that Google is unlawfully withholding payments for traffic that ActiveCast sent to Google advertisers according to their contract agreement with Google DoubleClick AdExchange. The online advertising world can be quite … Read more
Google has put forth a new offer to settle an ongoing legal case brought against them through the European Union. Several months ago Google put forth an offer to attempt to settle the case, but the EU’s Competition Commissioner (yes, that’s a real position), Joaquin Almunia did not accept the terms. Google has now put … Read more
Last week there was an article posted HERE which talked about some affiliate marketers such as Adam wellington of UpSurge Media who are working to change and ‘reform’ the affiliate marketing industry. While the article brought up some excellent points, it had an overall negative tone of the current and past history of the performance … Read more
As many have already heard, Google has announced a huge change in their search engine. They have replaced the search algorithm with an entirely new one (still based on the old one) and have named it “Hummingbird” The goal, according to Google, is to provide better results to users based on the way people are … Read more
Affinity.com, which is a world-wide leader in contextual ad networking with over 60 Billion impressions globally being served each month across its network has launched a new tool to protect its customers. SHIELD, which is described as, “a comprehensive, real-time traffic quality and brand safety technology to ward-off the evils of online advertising” was designed … Read more
Anyone who has participated in, or had any dealings with online poker sites such as PokerStars and Full Tilt will remember “Black Friday” in April of 2011 where top online poker sites were shut down, and any money in active accounts was seized. There was an extensive legal battle between the US Government and these … Read more
Google recently announced that they were looking into the option of discontinuing the use of third-party cookies for tracking browsing habits. In their place, Google is considering creating its own system, which uses an anonymous identifier for each individual. Supporters of this change say that it would improve consumer privacy, but those against the plan … Read more