mThink

We are very serious people here at mThink Manor, fully focused on the future of performance marketing, but sometimes the drama of the affiliate marketing space just pulls us in. This week Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) put on his suit of armor and rode to the rescue of Kim Rowley, accusing Aunesty Janssen and Patrick Reikofski of being "bad people" and "scum". Not to take it lying down, in response they started a blog accusing Kim of hacking into a Facebook account, running "sex blogs" and "Cyber Stalking".

Our round up of news you may have missed this week includes:
     – Facebook’s new ad unit, the "sponsored story";
     – Google targeting thin-content sites;
     – The single best computer desk setup we have EVER seen;
     – Epic Direct recruiting college students as affiliates;
     – Facebook linking location and demographics with mobile ad inventory? 

Affiliate Summit West was one of the best-attended and diverse shows of the last few years. It left me reflecting upon several industry trends. On the positive side, there seems to be a shift toward proprietary technology development and also a focus on internal traffic sources as a value-add for advertisers. On the technology side, many companies are investing in building their own tracking platforms, specifically education portals. Couple that with the development of internal media buying teams for social, contextual and display and it makes for a steady and scalable product suite.

There are now:

- 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide.
- 107 trillion emails sent in 2010.
- 36 billion photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
- 262 billion spam emails per day.

You want to know how many people are following Lady Gaga and why your staff are looking at their screens in slack-jawed wonder? More Internet By The Numbers after the jump.

Adknowledge has announced that it has just raised over $200 million via a mixture of equity and debt financing. The announcement specifically mentions that the money will be used to expand its network in both the USA and overseas, with the focus being on their BidSystem CPC/CPA network.

Adknowledge has announced that it has just raised over $200 million via a mixture of equity and debt financing. The announcement specifically mentions that the money will be used to expand its network in both the USA and overseas, with the focus being on their BidSystem CPC/CPA network.

While affiliates gathered in Vegas and then found themselves stuck by the snow storm on the East Coast, life went on. CPC rates were found to have gone up by an average of almost 20% during 2010. YouTube announced it was serving 200 million views a day to mobile devices and is now going to run ads on that traffic. And spammers invaded Mechanical Turk. Catch up with news you can use after the jump.

New Mobile Video Ads On YouTube As Traffic Triples

#1 Self Regulation: Big Hat, No Cattle