Cashing Out: Week of March 15th-21st, 2009 in Online Marketing News
Lemming Effect: Hawaii, Tennessee, Connecticut, and Minnesota follow in New York’s Footsteps
In late February we heard that California had put forward legislation in Assembly Bill 178 to mimic New York’s ill conceived Amazon Tax. This week a four other states joined the herd, including:
Hawaii: HB 1405 (pdf)
Minnesota: SF 282
Tennessee: SB 1741 and HB 1947
Connecticut: SB 806
In response to the Hawaii bill Amazon, has already stated in testimony that it will drop Hawaii affiliates. ABestWeb has setup a sub-forum called Affiliate Tax Laws to with some excellent content provided by affiliates Mark Welch and Melanie Seery. Also the Performance Marketing Alliance has launched a campaign against the California bill in conjunction with California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers Association.
Rich Media Pop-Ups Help Snag $4.1 Million in Funding for Apture
Helping publishers enhance their content through rich media overlays has proved worthwhile for Apture which announced $4.1 million dollars in Series A funding from Clearstone Venture Partners. Apture allows publishers to use text to trigger content from sources like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter. Apture is free for publishers with less than five million page views per month and offers a subscription service for larger publishers and for content customization. It also serves as an ad network that splits its revenue stream with publishers.
Epic Targets Google’s Cloud Computing Services
Google’s self admitted privacy breach two weeks ago has become the target of a lobbying initiative by The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Based on the breach, EPIC has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the privacy and security measures of Google services like Gmail and Google Docs. The demand even asks the FTC place a stay on Google services like Gmail until heavier security safeguards are installed.
AdMob Allows Apps to Swap Ads for Traffic
In a move to secure its position as the largest mobile ad network for the iPhone, AdMob has announced that it will allow app developers on its network to exchange ad inventory for promotional traffic for their apps. Thus developers can choose between monetization or distribution on the network. For the moment this exchange is only good for iPhone app developers although AdMob does run on other platforms including Google’s Android.
