As you may have noticed, we have lauched a Public Service Announcement-type campaign to support those in Haiti. You can find more details at http://assetize.com/haiti.

This campaign not only encourages your followers to donate money through one of the accredited aid agencies (e.g. CARE and the Red Cross), but Assetize will also be donating money every time one of your followers retweets our message or changes their background.

We’re doing our part and also encouraging others to do the same. For example, if an advertise launches a campaign on the Assetize network, we have commited to donating 100% of the money towards Haiti and will pay out publishers ourselves.

If you do know of any advertisers who are thinking about social network marketing, please pass this along – it’s like free advertising for them while their money ends up as a donation to a great cause.

Twitter has published some new rules regarding affiliate marketing, which can be found here:http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915

Here are some excerpts we would like to bring to your attention:

Feeds of your own blog: It’s generally fine to automate your account with updates of your own content; just be sure to review the Twitter Rules before setting up your automation…

Feeds for community benefit: We welcome feeds that are used for community benefit or provide non-commercial information to a niche group of users, such as local weather feeds or transit information….

Automated or mass-created affiliate advertising is not permitted on Twitter…

Updates that are posted automatically to your account through a tool or third-party application, for which you are compensated (whether on a “per-click,” “per-sale,” “per-tweet,” or other basis), are prohibited…

All sponsored or paid updates must be manually approved

From the above, you’ll notice that using Assetize to post news content on your account is completely acceptable. However, they do require that all ads sent through accounts must be approved each time.

Our goal is to work within Twitter’s Terms of Service so that you can continue to see the benefits of your valuable Twitter account. As such, we’ll be making the following changes:
1) Assetize will no longer publish ads automatically through accounts in-stream. All ads will first be sent to publishers for approval, and will then be posted. Due to this change, you will see fewer ads within your stream.
[We have asked for, and received, permission from Twitter to run the Haiti in-stream campaign (more below), so these will continue to run in an automated fashion]
2) If you use RSS feeds to send out content through Assetize, all content links will show an ad bar on the destination pages. You may have already noticed this, as we have been testing it out with a few valuable accounts. Users will now be paid based on a combination of an account’s influence, as well as the number of times their content gets clicked — a CPM-like model.

To see examples of this format, visit our homepage at http://assetize.com. Not only does this keep you earning money, but is a much less intrusive and less interruptive solution for your followers!

Mark Twain said the above after reading his own obituary in the New York Journal, but he might as well have been talking about advertising as a revenue model for news publishers.

Publishers have all lost large sums of ad revenue, of course – $7.5B is a BIG number for anyone (except Wall Street bankers looking for TARP money). But Robert Niles wrote a great blog post recently discussing the 3 revenue models for journalism, and how they’re not going to change:

1. Direct purchases, such as subscriptions, copy sales and tickets

2. Advertising

3. Donations, including direct contributions and grant funding

His thoughts on #2, Advertising:

Despite fears about the death of advertising, I say that there will always be people willing to pay to gain access to others’ audiences. That, distilled, is the definition of advertising.

Social media may provide a new ways for retailers and other business to speak directly to customers and would-be customers, but as anyone who’s started a Twitter feed with no followers can attest – building an audience is hard. Buying access to an established audience that you’re not now reaching is, for businesses with money, a far easier way. Advertising endures.

Online, advertising takes new forms – from banner ads to interstitials to affiliate links – but none of these forms are fundamentally different from any form of advertising that has come before. They remain a way for a publisher to sell access to its audience to another. So long as a publisher builds an audience, it will have the ability to rent access to it to advertisers. At which price point the publisher will be able to do that will depend upon the audience, and the amount of competition also reaching that audience.

What does this all mean for publishers?

It means that, although ad revenues may be declining for publishers, they’re not dead… nor are they going to die anytime soon. As revenues decline for print and other mediums, publishers need to focus harder on the value that they’re creating through new distribution channels, and then move quickly to monetize these. Access to a publisher’s captive audience is always going to be valuable to advertisers, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Happy Assetizing,
Saif