07 Jul 10 Canadian Tire closes their online affiliate program – will CanadianTire.ca survive ?
Well, less than 18 months after Canadian Tire essentially closed their online store, they’ve now officially announced the demise of their affiliate program. The affiliate program was initially designed for webmasters to make a commission on sales generated by driving visitors to the CT online store to make purchases. Once the online store was essentially closed, the affiliate program languished on – albeit it was pretty much to reward webmasters who sent visitors that bought CT gift cards; which are one of the few products they now sell online.
I ran campaigns on several client sites pointing traffic to the Canadian Tire site, and I’m also (like any real Canadian) a big fan of Canadian Tire, so I’m a bit saddened to see them backing away even further from the online world as far as eCommerce goes. Perhaps they just figured out that their core clientele preferred the fun of shopping in their bricks and mortar outlets. That, or the prohibitive cost of offering reasonable shipping rates given the weight and volume of most products they sell outweighed the expanded marketplace.
Here’s the official news we received:
Dear Robin Majumdar,
Please be advised that Canadian Tire has decided to discontinue their affiliate program. We would like to thank you for all of your hard work and dedication over the years to the Canadian Tire affiliate program. As of JULY 31st 2010 activity will no longer be tracked through Linkshare for the Canadian Tire affiliate program and the Canadian Tire affiliate agreement with you will expire.
PLEASE REMOVE ALL CANADIAN TIRE CREATIVE supplied through Linkshare including text links, banners, data feeds, or any other type of Linkshare link for the Canadian Tire affiliate program by July 31st 2010. After this date, links will no longer track or land on their intended landing pages.
Canadian Tire will not be transitioning their affiliate program to another network. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Tim Mueller (Linkshare) and The Canadian Tire Affiliate Team
Note the final quote about not transition to another network (from Linkshare) which pretty much drives a nail into the online venture for Canadian Tire – for now. The question that remains… how much longer will CanadianTire.ca. continue to exist – and in what form?
Tags: affiliate programs, Canadian Tire, LinkShare, Monetization
14 Jun 09 Chitika hits 50,000 publishers – congrats! a great way to supplement your Adsense & other website revenue methods
I’ve managed website monetization strategies for quite a while now, and first started using Chitika about 3 years ago or so, when they were essentially providing widgets to online stores that would pay a commission. At the time, it was a murky fit if you already had Adsense running, since it involved an option to insert their code to deliver ads in a contextual manner (adjusting ads based on the content of your page)…
At the time they offered 2 types of ad integration for website publishers; either through a fixed keyword method (where you chose a keyword to indicate products to be placed from their pool of advertisers) and a contextual method where they would place ads based on your page content. At the time, Adsense was the biggest (perhaps only significant?) player in the contextual text ad game, so it was hard to really give up the “sure-fire” Adsense revenue to experiment with Chitika. I did try it with the specific keyword method, but their product advertiser range was quite limited – mainly electronics; and as such it didn’t work well with our non-electronics based sites.
That all changed around a year ago, and now they have a great advertising model, where their JavaScript-based ad code only appears to visitors arriving from a search engine. Basically their ad code recognizes the search string that your visitor used on the referring search engine, and then Chitika displays relevant ads based on that particular keyword. It’s not purely contextual, and therefore can be used in tandem with Google Adsense – the latter program specifically disallows for the use of concurrent contextual advertising spots.
This way, it’s only your visitors who arrive from search engines who see the Chitika ads, and you get paid per click that your visitors do on the ads. The payouts are quite decent, and it’s fairly uninstrusive for your visitor base.
Congrats to Chitika who just reached 50,000 publishers! If you own a website, I highly recommend you try out Chitika and get a few extra dollars flowing your way.
Tags: AdSense, Chitika, Monetization, ppc, Web 2.0
03 Jun 09 Official : Microsoft to close Office Live Affiliate Program
OK, so admittedly, I haven’t been maintaining the site over the last few weeks (check the right sidebar for my Twitter activity tho’)… regardless, just got a note from Adrienne Erreca of Commission Junction that pretty much confirms that Microsoft will be ending the affiliate program for Office Live.
I don’t think that MSFT is unhappy with the affiliate model, rather it’s most probably a rebranding strategy (Bing it, you’ll see)…
Office Live was pretty much MSFT’s first foray into SaaS cloud computing targeting small and medium businesses that were (for the most part) already exploring online tools like Google Docs.
Did anyone make any coin referring visitors to Microsoft Office Live? They’re paying $1 per registration for their service – but only until June 30th!
Here’s the official news:
From: Microsoft Office Live [mailto:owner-membermessaging@mx6.cj.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 8:31 PM
Subject: Microsoft Office Live affiliate program to close 6/30/09Robin Majumdar,
We’re writing to let you know that the Microsoft Office Live Small Business affiliate program will be closing 6/30/09.
We appreciate all of the time and effort that you put into promoting the program and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at aerreca@cj.com or 805.730.8377.
Sincerely,
The Microsoft Office Live Affiliate Team
Adrienne Erreca | Sr. Program Manager
Commission Junction | a Valueclick Company
Tags: Adrienne Erreca, affiliate programs, Microsoft Office Live, Monetization, Web 2.0
10 Apr 09 Shoemoney outs yet another Adsense check photo thief
Well, anyone who is somewhat into the Internet marketing space, PPC or CPA or whatever else, is certainly familiar with the (in)famous photo of Jeremy Schoemaker posing with his $127K Adsense check a few years ago.
Well, Jeremy is on top of his game and twittered about this eBay auction sale for a (mediocre) domain name InternetAirCard .com that uses the Shoemoney Adsense photo as the primary photo in the auction.
Chutzpah!
Tags: $132994.97 Adsense check, AdSense, copyright, eBay, Jeremy Schoemaker, Monetization, Shoemoney
