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Anybody get one? I don’t really keep up with news that much and didn’t find out that they were open for registration until about 16 hours after the fact. Still I grabbed a few domains and will probably do nothing with them. Some of the ones I got :

Drummers.me (might do something with this one just for fun)
Mints.me
That.me
Credit-Report.me

Just fun to play around with I guess, but the minimum 2 year signing at $20 is kind of ghetto, ended up spending ~$500.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Not going to just repeat ‘ol Google, so just check it here.

Now you can see an approximate search volume chart from Google herself. I compared this to the SEO Book Keyword Tool volume indicator, which pulls from WordTracker. I did a search for “dogs”…here are the monthly volumes :

Google – 1,000,000 searches
WordTracker – 793,259 searches

Fairly close results (I did the exact match option in Google and I’m guessing that’s what WT does).

Popularity: 6% [?]

Sorry to make 2 posts in a row about the same garbage, but I LOL’d when I watched the 3rd Episode of the Top Affiliate Challenge. Jon Van Clute is bragging on how he gets 200,000 targeted visitors at a $2CPM, and then for those “uneducated” affiliates out there, the Top Affiliate Challenge shows us the math in calculating how much Van Clute spends.

They’re real geniuses, great affiliatez math sk1llz!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ok so I’m not sure if I’m the first one to write about this…but the Top Affiliate Challenge TV show officially sucks. It looked like it could be O.K. at best, but after finding out how it works and watching the first episode, I can confirm why I knew it would be a waste of time and money to audition and try to get on the show. Here’s why :

• Their whole “business model” for competition is stupid. The goal is to make “as much money as possible through affiliate marketing”. They look at revenue as making money, and not profit. So a team can spend $5,000 in PPC and only make $1,000 in revenue. That’s a $4,000 net loss but in the eyes of TAC, you just made $1,000.
• How do they expect you to learn and get a profitable campaign running in like 2 hours? The team that wins will simply be the team that takes a little loss and switches their campaigns over to the team’s affiliate link. I was working with Team XY7 a little and was about to move over a campaign that does ~$1,500/day (they would still fund it), but just thinking about doing something like that for this show is completely pointless. That’s totally against the point of having a challenge to find the “top affiliate”.
• The camera work looks like it was done with a $100 Flip video camera and edited by a 15 year old freshman in high-school. There’s cheesy ass hues on the border of the screen, ridiculous looking fonts, the whole thing looks insanely cheap. They’ll be talking and it will just break the frame and cut to a new one, it’s not smooth at all.
• The host looks like she just learned how to read and is reading the script off a piece of paper. Oh wait, you’ll see her looking at the ground all the time, and the awesome camera man has her script showing laying on the floor.
• The gurus pulled together their elite resources and drove a massive $200 revenue for the win on the first day.
• We have The Apprentice in NYC, American Idol is Los Angeles, Survivor on some crazy Chinese island, and Top Affiliate Challenge in…Nebraska. Could they have picked a more boring venue?
• I just skimmed through the second episode which leaked on Google Video. Team XY7 lost, so one of their teammates was going to get voted off. Then they had an individual immunity challenge, somebody from a different team won it. Why the hell would someone that wouldn’t get voted off anyways win an immunity ring? The guy is a saint though and ends up giving it to someone from XY7. The hostess then tells him it doesn’t even matter, because that person is safe anyways. Umm…pointless?

My prediction : many affiliates on the show will truly realize how pointless the competition is and when that happens, things will start to get really stupid and it’ll be funny to see how the TAC deals with it. That’ll at least be some entertainment.

I have nothing against Thor as he was nice to me when I chatted with him about auditioning, but the show is a complete mess. I can’t even sit through a full episode without being completely bored to death, the show teaches absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing, and since it’s not even entertaining it’s completely pointless to watch.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Check it out.

Dude got nailed for $230 million for phishing Myspace accounts and selling things like ringtones.

The last paragraph mentions Scott Richter (owner of CPA Empire) as also being on the list to get hit, we’ll see what happens with that.

If only people were happy enough with the amount of money you can make without spamming :).

Popularity: 4% [?]