CEO Oliver Roup presented at the conference. His talk was titled “Affiliate Freakanomics” and he broke down the disparity between CPC and CPA advertising and why CPA often doesn’t achieve the same payout percentages CPC has, despite being a more accountable lower risk form of advertising. He conclusion is optimistic and he offers suggestions for how publishers can move in the right direction. Check out his presentation below.

We are also ready to help you sort through any questions you might have about disclosing your affiliate relationships to comply with FTC regulations. We encourage all publishers to abide by FTC guidelines and disclose their affiliate relationships, but we also make it very easy to do. Check out our disclosure page to read more and to select from one of six disclosure badges we provide for you. The disclosure badges will bring your readers back to the disclosure page if they click through, providing them brief explanation and links to all the information they might want to know about the FTC ruling.

Adding a disclosure badge is also the easiest way to participate in our referral program. If anyone clicks on your badge and signs up, you can earn extra money!

Galen Thompson

Relationship Manager, VigLink

On May 5th I got an interesting email. One of our competitors, Driving Revenue had bumped into us talking to a potential customer. Maybe we should chat?

We met for dinner in Chicago. We liked each other. Our companies had very complementary strengths. One thing led to another.

On Friday we signed the last of the paperwork to acquire the company. Driving Revenue was the first to do automated affiliate marketing and was completely bootstrapped to profitability by the founders Raymond Lyle and Jack Bafia. They boast a great customer list, a ton of depth in affiliate marketing and have built out a great team to support them.

We’re very excited to be joining forces. Ray is going to lead the sales and merchant relationship team and run our Chicago office. Jack will be moving to San Francisco to assume leadership of the product team. Everyone else is keeping their job as well.  They’ve all made a big bet on the future of the combined business. They are doubling down, not cashing out.

What does this mean for our customers? It means more scale, more merchant coverage and better rates. It means more resources to devote to engineering great new products and more people to devote to getting the word out and talking to our customers.

As part of this deal, our key investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital both more than doubled their investment in the company. We feel great about their continued support. We couldn’t ask for a more helpful, supported and connected board.

So as I said, it’s a very exciting day for VigLink. To our team, customers and investors – onwards and upwards. To the Driving Revenue family – welcome aboard!

Oliver Roup

CEO / co-founder, VigLink

More information can be found on our press page.

If you refer a fellow publisher to VigLink, you will earn a referral fee equal to 10% of their earnings for the first year. Their earnings will not be affected.

So if you find VigLink valuable, please, tell your friends. Our customers know how much time and energy it can save, and how effortless it is to make money from the content they’re already writing. Help us spread the word and you will share in the success of the publishers you refer.

Naturally, any link you create on a site with VigLink installed is automatically active in the referral program. Go ahead and write a blog post and link to viglink.com, and VigLink does the rest. If anyone clicks that link, signs up, and generates revenue, you will get a bonus of 10% of that revenue. If you want to promote us on twitter, facebook, or somewhere that is not your site use the link provided on the Account tab. Those signups and earnings will also be tracked.

UPDATE: Check out the easiest way to participate in the referral program, and disclose your affiliate relationships at the same time. VigLink Disclosure Badges!

As always, if you have thoughts, comments or concerns, please don’t hesitate to email us at support@viglink.com.

Galen Thompson

Relationship Manager, VigLink

There’s been some noise in the blogosphere over the discovery that Posterous had installed VigLink and was utilizing it to monetize the latent commercial traffic on their platform. We’ve avoided commenting until our customer decided what they wanted to do in order to avoid interfering in what is no doubt a sensitive matter for them.

VigLink leaves decisions around disclosure up to our customers. Our terms of service require publishers to comply with all applicable local regulations but as these are still new and evolving, we leave it to our customer to judge what is most appropriate for their specific communities and their local legal jurisdiction.

In the coming weeks we will be working to make it easier for publishers to disclose the use of VigLink through branded badges a publisher may add to their site, linking to a clear explanation of what we do and offering the ability for a permanent customer opt-out. However, the ultimate decisions on how best to disclose will remain in the hands of our customers.

A few points of technical clarification:

• We and our competitors do not affect the PageRank of a page. We have received assurances from Google that this is so (we are backed by Google Ventures) and Danny Sullivan has written that he’s received the same guidance from Google. Our publishers who watch these things closely report no change in PageRank as a result of using our code.
• Posterous was not overwriting any existing affiliate links. Neither are 99% of our customers. The option is available for customers who would like it (those who run forums prohibiting commercial links for example) but very few have done so.
• We work hard not to “break the web” – we don’t use redirects, ad blockers work as intended and even if our servers are unreachable the page continues to behave as expected. We’ve gotten reports that middle clicks under some circumstances were mis-behaving and so we’ve disabled all modified click rewriting until we get this issue sorted out.
• We also work closely with merchants and affiliate networks to ensure we are meeting the requirements of their programs. Some merchants have “blacklists” or “whitelists” and we only affiliate links from publishers that those merchants find acceptable.
• Any link can be marked “not rewriteable” by adding the attribute rel=”norewrite” to the anchor tag. We will add a global tag that allows a page author to easily opt the whole page out of being rewritten.
• Offering the ability for our customers to share the revenue with their customers is something we are investigating. There are numerous technical and business challenges involved but we hope to be able to offer this ability where appropriate in the future.

VigLink believes that sites that facilitate commercial activity are contributing to the ecosystem and unobtrusively deriving revenue from that activity is entirely appropriate. We recognize that community expectations about what is acceptable will vary widely and we think decisions about what’s most appropriate in a given context are best left to our customers. We are working to provide even more tools for all our customers meet the expectations of their community.

If you have comments or concerns about VigLink, you can contact us at feedback@viglink.com or me personally at oroup@viglink.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Oliver Roup

Co-founder / CEO, VigLink

Amazon and the Colorado legislature have created quite a stir in the affiliate marketing community recently. Colorado passed a new tax law affecting online commerce and Amazon responded by terminating its affiliate relationship with all Colorado affiliates. You can find more information here. Also available is copy of the letter from Amazon to its Colorado affiliates. This is a broad debate with larger implications for online retailers, but the the real hardship is borne by the Colorado affiliates. Other laws affecting the taxation of online commerce have passed in New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island with the similar results — in some cases the dropping of hard working affiliates. Laws have also been considered in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee.

VigLink may be able to help. Affiliate marketing is a profession for some, a hobby for others, and an important source of income for many.  One of our goals as a company is to improve the status quo in affiliate marketing, and we are working to make affiliate marketing easier and more profitable for publishers while bringing value to the merchants and protecting their ability to manage their brand and make their own business decisions.  Contact us for more information info [at] viglink dot com.

Fred is so dead on, it’s a little frightening. About 1/2 dozen people had sent me the post within a few hours. The quality of the comments on his blog are also among the best I’ve ever seen. We’re only days away from a public announce and the temptation to jump in here is almost overwhelming.

Obviously we’re not in display, but a bunch of what he writes about resonates for us.

A couple notable things about this post:

• He talks about the “buy side” and “sell side” of the market, something we haven’t seen enough of and something we talked a lot about when we were out pitching for funding.
• He uses the word vigorish. Awesome. Publishers should get their (fair) cut.
• He does some simple models to identify that publishers are being underpaid for the value they’re driving.
• He talks about fragmentation among publishers as a key source of weakness.

Although he’s talking about display, I think a lot of his insights apply to us. The market is ripe.

For 15 years we’ve been training webmasters to think in pageviews. How many do you have? What are they worth? How can you get more? The fact that nobody can agree on the answer to that question is a symptom of the fact that the pageview does not tell the whole story.

Chris Dixon (of whom we’re big fans) has an awesome recent blog post: “Why Content Sites are Getting Ripped Off”

He cites one of his readers Tim Ogilvie defining the difference between “intent generators” and “intent harvesters” and makes the basic point that only the harvesters get paid and that this is a problem that publishers need to correct. He’s absolutely right and he says it more cleanly than anyone I’ve seen so far. I’m going to be pointing my customers to his blog.

As a publisher, I want to know:

• Where am I sending my users?
• More importantly, what are they doing once they get there?
• How much value is that driving?
• How can I claim some of that value for the traffic I’m providing?

Every time a click leaves a publishers site, value is being created. We call this event “the outclick”. Publishers should be able to claim some of that value. But how do you measure it? How do you “claim” it? These are the problems VigLink will address. Exciting times…