I made $622,322.96 in 2009 from affiliate marketing. AMA. : IAmA

if you were to start in this business today I would highly recommend skipping [link building] and getting right into marketing products through PPC with Google Adwords. It’s probably the easiest way to make money online and you can make a lot if you only knew the basics.

via I made $622,322.96 in 2009 from affiliate marketing. AMA. : IAmA.

Just above that quote, the writer says he’d used onlywire.com to create backlinks.

Borrell: Political Online Ad Spend is $44 million out of $42 billion

After the 2011 off-year for major political contests, online political ads will not top the $100 million mark until 2012.

via Borrell: Political Online Ad Spend Will Be Local—And Miniscule | paidContent.

Update on cash and short term holdings of tech and telecom companies- Feb 7 2010

I guess since Business Insider has decided to do this, I don’t have to pull these anymore.

via Update on cash and short term holdings of tech and telecom companies « ecpm blog.

Here’s their latest: Apple’s Massive Pile Of Cash In Context

Revisiting enterprise search: software revs in the enterprise search market totaled $1.1 billion worldwide

As search matures, it will no doubt get more specialized.  Enteprise is a big niche that’s remained quite stable over the years with a little noise coming from the Apache Lucene project.

The fact is that firm behavior when addressing site search or enterprise search is quite since the market is already captive.  Reluctance to share data with third parties and lack of compelling business cases ultimately boil down to too little upside for too much risk.

So what’s the state of play?  We’re at a steady state where there’s still a lot of pain inside organizations, little innovation due to existence of non-technological hurdles, and really no competitive threat since this tech sits within the fences of these businesses.

Currently, the market is dominated by Microsoft and Autonomy, though recently, the Apache Lucene project (commercialized by Lucid Imagination) has made inroads into the enterprise, as has Google’s search appliance.

But Microsoft has one huge advantage, in that it effectively controls the data through the Windows file system, along with a vast array of applications and server platforms.

via Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix | Software, Interrupted – CNET News.

Microsoft gets more search from Facebook

But as widely noted, they lose display.  I think Microsoft should be fine with this, since they seem to be more focused on winning in search.  What’s more interesting is Facebook’s strategy here with completely removing banner ads.  Putting banner ads on a social networking site was more or less bolting on a scalable advertising system onto a site with massive traffic, regardless of the fit with the product experience.  That’s why you have such low CPMs for these things.  The Facebook social ads are a better fit and it’s not surprising that it monetizes better.  The question is whether it can scale to what it needs to be (for investors to get a return they want on their investment).

As part of this expanded cooperation in search, our two companies will soon provide Facebook users with a more complete search experience by providing full access to great Bing features beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions.

via Bing – Enhanced Cooperation with Facebook on Search – Search Blog – Bing Community.

DSPs are known as Certified Ad Networks on Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange

I love people’s love/hate feelings with the DSP acronym.

via Microsoft Ad Exchange To Begin Testing; DoubleClick Rumors In The UK; Ad Networks Apparently Forgot To Die.

“This is not an asset class. This is a train wreck.”

“This is not an asset class. This is a train wreck.”

via Frank Quattrone, Star Banker of Technology Ventures, Talks Wistfully of the Good Old Days—Before Netscape’s IPO | Xconomy.

That’s a nice little sound bite from Frank Quattrone.  What I found interesting was that Quattrone says the entire chain needs an overhaul, including the mutual funds that buy into tech IPOs and hold for the long haul:

”The whole approach to marketing and allocating IPOs has to change,” Quattrone said. “The mutual funds that are committed to being long-term holders of the stock—the T. Rowe Prices and the Neuberger Berman Guardians who really understand tech—should get more.”

Answers.com’s Deal With Google

Answers.com CEO Rosenschein says that the company’s partnership with Google was immaterial.  That’s not so surprising given that the traffic that Google was sending was not very monetizable.  What’s interesting is that towards the end of the article, Rosenschein suggests that they could have done a rev share with Google for the link to a page with ads.

This is similar to what AOL has been suggesting about getting their content better embedded in the search index and potentially sharing revenue with Google.  It sounds like the monetary and strategic benefits of winning AOL’s search partnership will be the only driver for even entertaining something like that because the eCPCs are relatively small for Google.  How would these links compete with regular sponsored listings?  Or would they complement editorial search (which would raise big flags)?

For the Answers.com agreement, Google had stipulations. The search giant wanted only dictionary words, excluding Answers.com’s encyclopedic sources ranging from pop culture icons to international locales. Neither side pushed for a contract.

“It was a completely gentlemanly relationship,” Rosenschein said. “Doing a contract would have removed their flexibility if they one day decided to remove us.”

Besides, “What could we have given them?” Rosenschein asked. “A cut of the revenue to that page? It would have been immaterial to them.”

via How Answers.com became Google’s default dictionary | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Buying video ads on YouTube

Combine video and overlay formats with search targeting on a site with pages views at scale and it starts to get interesting:

“Obviously, we think Promoted Videos is a great way for small businesses to tell their stories and reach customers with video in a scaleable way,” said YouTube monetization chief Shishir Mehotra.

YouTube has been working hard to put those tools into place and early signs are it is getting some search advertisers to buy campaigns on the video site. The site keeps a tight lid on revenue, but told Ad Age that “thousands” of advertisers are using self-service tools to advertise on YouTube each day. In the fourth quarter, paid clicks on promoted videos doubled from the prior three months.

via YouTube Looks For Google-Sized Revenue In Video Search Ads.

Google To Be “Aggressive” Renewing AOL Search Deal

These sorts of deals could get really interesting– no longer just a straight up search rev share deal but content integration which leads to monetizable page views.  If you can count the clicks, you can do a rev share:

The main thing Tim and AOL want from a search deal is to be able to run search ads linking to AOL (AOL) content instead of ads linking to the search provider’s advertisers.

“[The deal] doesn’t just have to be good for the search part of the business. There are other things in the search deal that we may or may  not trade off for search money.”

via Google To Be “Aggressive” Renewing AOL Search Deal.