Recently in Internet Trends Category

Charlie Rose has a fabulous interview with Michael Arrington surveying many of the most important topics of the Web today.  They discuss major Internet trends like blogging and social networking, American's media consumption on the web eclipsing that of old media--TV and newspapers--as well as current events like Microsofts bid for Yahoo.

I highly recommend watching it.  Michael amazingly synthesizes and conveys all the important, and sometimes overwhelming, information clearly and beautifully.

There must be some unhappy Amazon affiliates this week with the announcement of Amazon Giver and Grapevine. TechCrunch has the scoop. These two new facebook apps allow you to get an Amazon wishlist right on your Facebook profile page. They also allow you to get product recommendations and actually buy products without leaving Facebook.

   
My initial thought was that this is a big bummer for the half a dozen or so other apps that already link to amazon product pages (with a nice little affiliate link). Competition from the big fish has gotta hurt the conversion rate. It also makes you wonder how successful are these Facebook apps that try to monetize by driving affiliate conversions? There are apps like visual bookshelf that are actually useful. They provide a useful service that users actually want. In Visual Bookshelf's case they let you see what your friends are reading. They also provide a link to Amazon were you can buy your copy. Visual Bookshelf has over 29,000 active users today. Apparently someone likes the app, but are people buying books from it?

Amazon must think there is some potential here, but as of today Grapevine and Giver have 124 and 221 active users respectively.  Granted the apps have been live for less than a week, but thats still not much of an adoption. Time will tell. Bill care to weigh in?

A few of the 'big boys' on the web but especially in print media--Tribune, Gannett, Hearst, and the New York Times--are forming an online sales network to attract premium advertisers for their content.  Tech crunch covers the news here.

The network is called quandrantONE and is intended to compete with major context advertising from Yahoo and Google.  This specialization will hopefully attract higher quality and better targeted ads to serve these companies' networks.

This really doesn't mean a whole lot for affiliate marketers as they won't be able to use the network, but it does show a growing number of niche and specialized ad networks.  With more and more of these networks emerging there are better opportunities for advertisers to better target their markets.  But, there also comes an increasing disconnect between ad networks.

If you think of highly "target-able", premium ad space as a commodity, and take into account the growing number of "markets" that you can buy these commodities from, then it may not be too crazy to think of a "market of markets" emerging.  This market of markets could be thought of as a commodities exchange, much like what we think of the Chicago Board of Trade or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Perhaps not too far from now we will see these ad spaces (markets) be unified by a single market--the Internet Advertising exchange.