Google Trends On Black Friday

Online retailers are likely getting a huge surge of traffic today as many consumers are avoiding the congestion of the mall by shopping online.

Here are the top Trends on Google at 1:52PM CST:

Top Google Trends

* black friday online deals
* cyber monday 2009
* leftover turkey recipes
* iron bowl 2009 game time
* turkey soup
* ugg boots black friday
* josh mcdaniels f bomb
* zhu zhu pets toys r us
* retailmenot
* jos a bank
* blackfridaydeals 2009 online
* joseph a bank
* yowza
* turkey trot results 2009
* amazon coupons

In other news, FB Ad reviewers have apparently taken the day off or are heavily sedated from turkey leftovers.

Affiliate Networks: Optimized Rotators Fail

Banner optimizers on affiliate networks feel more like a meat grinder than optimized rotation. If you’re like me, you’ve checked out all these “optimized” banner rotators at Clickbooth and other networks. You’ve probably also seen that these “optimized” rotators are the worst performing adverts you’ve placed since those affiliate banners for fire places in 1995 (if you remember these, you are a ninja).

Most ad networks rely on your assigned Affiliate Manager to optimize the ads in said rotation and this is where the ball gets dropped. We’ll never know if the technology is any good because it’s bombarded with unproductive offers that no one would run on their site if they had the choice (feel like turning your computer in a TV tuner, lolz).

If you do not run volume and have a great relationship with your Affiliate Manager you are already dead in the water on optimized rotation.

Clickbooth has a small advantage because they allow webmasters to choose which offers are in rotation (if your AM ever gets back to you, some are good there, some you will never hear from for years, hope you got a good one), but their interface is not very intuitive. Most campaigns you select take a few days for approval, then a few days to see if it works or not for whatever GEO you’re showing it in, then the process keeps repeating and weeks go by before you nail down the right offer, and then it goes stale in 5 days.

Anyone with a wordpress plugin that rotates and geo target ads can generally outperform these rotators by 100 to 1 margin. There is a huge void right now someone could fill with an intelligent adserver. Unfortunately, none exist that I can find.

If you’re using optimized rotation and it’s working well for you please contact me 812.480.8889

Facebook Going Public, IPO Coming Soon

Zuckerberg creates new class of stock in preparation for selling to institutions and the public.

Insiders have been talking about the possibly of an IPO for months, but today the dual stock class decision is a clear indication that your chance to own some powerless B class shares is coming soon ;-)

I think I’ll try to backup the truck on FB stock when I can. Even after the institutional investors load up early and machine gun shares as the sheep, I think there will be enough juice left to make some serious gains before the 2.0 meltdown is initiated.

Twitter Traffic Plunges

Twitter’s traffic has dropped by about 25% in 90 days, reversing course on it’s giant exponential ramp up during spring and early summer.

Perhaps once people got intrigued by simple social networking, they moved on to interfaces that allowed more than 2 sentences.

Here is the image that must be keeping the twitter exec’s and $100 million investors really nervous:

Just over the past month traffic has declined an estimated 15%. Twitter did an enormous amount to help bring new people into social networking, but I think their hay day is coming to and end (and I’m sure plenty of people will be cheering as the old fail whale begins years of decline).

Facebook and Mafia Wars Face Lawsuit

Facebook and Mafia Wars creator Zynga ready for court as a class action lawsuit was filed today over “offer-based” ads that automatically rebilled users each month.

The “offers” consisted ads that asked users to complete surveys in return for prizes, but neglected to tell these users they were also being signed up to paid subscription services at the same time. This $5 million class action suit is the first of what is expected to be many rounds of court battles over Facebook’s ad practices.

It won’t be long until the lawsuits work their way down the chain to your favorite affiliate network.

Recent activity at Zynga and Facebook: Mafia War’s Zynga put out a statement last week announcing they had raised an additional $15.1mil of financing and have over 3 million people per day playing their games online. Facebooks traffic has nearly doubled over the past 6 months.