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Press Release MINNEAPOLIS – Dec. 10, 2012 – Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce, announced that it signed a global payments agreement with Skullcandy, Inc. (NASDAQ: SKUL), a high-growth performance lifestyle audio brand. Skullcandy is using the Digital River World Payments solution to build a localized European e- [...]

The subscription commerce sector is growing fast and is acting as an intensive prototyping lab for what works in selling products online. The benefits of creating a subscription revenue stream are huge with some reports claiming that over half of all US businesses are either already using or are actively exploring recurring revenue offerings. There [...]

I’m confused why we refer to this world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, MySpace, etc., as “social” media. From everything I’ve experienced, it should really be called “anti-social” media. The sad reality is that social media has devolved into a series of faceless and impersonal interactions through PCs, smartphones and tablets, whereby [...]

The FBI’s case against MegaUpload appears to depend in large part on up to five years of internal email and IM conversations gathered by FBI spyware programs installed on the suspect’s computers. Documents filed by the US authorities discuss alleged conversations between senior MegaUpload management that were carried out over the Skype instant-messaging system. This is intriguing given that Skype claims not to retain messages beyond 30 days and the criminal investigation supposedly didn’t begin until early last year. So where did the FBI get those messages?

Online gambling may soon be legalized once again if initiatives currently in Congress come to fruition. If that happens, many affiliates and networks will celebrate; and Facebook and Zynga’s revenues will grow like crazy.

While many in the performance marketing community have a lot of experience with traditional gambling websites, what will be fascinating is to see how the upsurge in mobile and social marketing creates both new opportunities and new challenges.

Total Web traffic plummets after shutdown, giraffes, Aston Martins and world domination. How can you not love this story?

#1 The Name is Investor. Kim Tim Jim Investor Kim Dotcom was born Kim Schmitz, but before changing his name to Kim Dotcom he went by the moniker of Kim Tim Jim Investor - possibly the most awesome name of all time.

LinkShare is holding its Symposium event here in San Francisco this week and the opening keynote by Forrester senior analyst, Andy Hoar, contained some terrific insights into the state of the performance marketing industry. I picked out five that look at coupons, social marketing, and growth opportunities:

1. Affiliate Marketing Growing 16% p.a.

One of the best things about the Blue Book survey is hearing from affiliates world-wide. It is an opportunity like no other to get an understanding of what is working and what people are struggling with. This year we took it a stage further, asking several of our respondents to dig a bit deeper and to tell us how they got started, what works for them now and how they plan on succeeding in the future.

 Frank Terranova

Create A Christmas Music Station In Pandora Who doesn’t like good holiday music? And these days, who doesn’t listen to Pandora? Although it’s not strictly performance marketing related, this seemed like too good a subject to ignore. And besides, isn’t it time you moved on from only listening to Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and that Charlie Brown jazz thing?