If you’re an Amazon Associate, you’ve probably heard rumors the past few weeks about changes to your commission rates. Amazon has officially updated its Amazon Associates Program Operating Agreement that will become effective on March 1st. The volume-based fee structure that you’re used to will now be converted to category-based, like Amazon Associates in the UK. Your commissions will no longer depend on if you sell 100 vs 10 products. Instead, Amazon cares more about what category your products are representing. Our team has been working hard internally and with industry experts, to clearly identify how affiliate sites will be affected from March 1st. We’ll be releasing a comprehensive analysis soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, it might be worth checking out all the recent FBA and Associates policies here.
In event news, Founder Thomas Smale is currently in Saigon where he’ll speaking at DCxSGN this Saturday. If you’re attending, make sure you head to the talk at 3:30 PM about “Scaling and Growth Strategies to Make Your Business Sellable.” Couldn’t get tickets to this weekend’s sold out event to see Thomas speak? We’ll be releasing his talk on our YouTube channel. In upcoming events, Thomas will be back in the States in Philly, speaking at Sellers’ Conference for Online Entrepreneurs. Have questions about your business and want to speak with Thomas? Hit reply and we’ll set up a 1:1.
Read about some SaaS acquisitions, mid-roll ads on Facebook, and searching for influencers via images below.
Deal Highlights
Affiliate – Pet Supplies – $4.7K gross/mo
- 31% revenue compound monthly growth rate over trailing six months
- 122% visitor compound monthly growth rate from first 3 month average to trailing 3 month average
- Outsourced content creation with an additional virtual assistant
- 11K keyword rankings
- Strong content and backlink investments
Yearly Net Profit: $44K
Asking Price: $110K
Sold:
Subscription Service Business – Social Media Marketing – $23K MRR
In the News…
Get Your Ads Place Mid-Roll Videos
Facebook is trying to solve their limited ad load problem by making available via Audience Network, ad placements in the middle of video plays. Yes, that means advertisers will now have the option of placing ads pre-roll and mid-roll. With live videos that break 300 viewers, Facebook is also allowing creators to include 20 second breaks for ads, aka commercials.
As Zuckerberg mentioned in the latest quarterly earnings call, Facebook is committing to digital video, with a special focus on originals. Moving towards a similar experience to television, Facebook hopes this will prepare the platform for more video content and potentially, ad load. In these efforts to find more monetization methods, Facebook plans on splitting revenue between 45-55% with creators.
If Pages or profiles have more than 2,000 followers and have reached more than 300 views in a live video, they will be allowed to use ad breaks in between the video. An ad break can only be introduced 4 minutes after broadcasting begins and then additional ad breaks can be used for every 5 minutes streamed.
If you’re an advertiser producing video ads or plan to, you’ll have the space on Facebook to produce more. If you’re just a video creator distributing on Facebook, there’s a potential for you to make more money – Facebook may be taking a higher cut though.
Hootsuite Makes Two Acquisitions in Two Weeks
At the beginning of this month, social media management platform, Hootsuite, picked up AdExpresso, a SaaS solution for Facebook and Instagram advertising. This week, Hootsuite announced that it’s also adding LiftMetrix to its portfolio. LiftMetrix is a social analytics provider that will further support social campaigns on Hootsuite with conversion tracking, content recommendations and integration with business intelligence tools. The addition of LiftMetrix and AdExpresso will give brands more insight to their social ROI and expand their reach.
Now with a user base up to 10 million, MarTech claims that this makes Hootsuite up for a potential IPO.
Influencer Tool Pairs You with Influencers via Photos
Dovetale is launching a new tool that will help brands find influencers who are posting the same image content. The tool can scan images that are uploaded to the platform and identify objects and people in the image, that the brand can then confirm accuracy. Users can also use specific keywords to search for images with people or objects in them. The platform will then provide a batch of influencers across YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter that have posted images they identify as similar to the ones the brand has uploaded to the platform and post.
A social influencer on the platform is defined by a score that compares likes and comments to followers, also weeding out spammy followers. Dovetale also provides tools that find influencers via keywords and social metrics, managing influencers, making Stripe-based payments and receiving performance reports. Up your influencer marketing strategy with this SaaS tool.