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iTunes Fails With RSS and Affiliate Program

Sometime in the next two months I will be launching music-post.com as a side project to my 9-5 job in the internet marketing world. I am starting this site mainly because I like music, but also, launching a site like this  gives me the chance to try and make a few bucks while  messing around polishing my tech  and marketing skills. There is no substitute for good old hands on, trial and error learning.

One of the technologies I am fascinated in is RSS, and more specifically the ability to use RSS to have a constantly updated site such as music-post, teeming with fresh content daily whether I decide to manually add something or not. Among other things such as mp3 hardware reviews, album reviews, tour schedules, and forums, I wanted to have iTunes power my top albums and top singles lists through their RSS feeds. In addition, I figured that as long as Apple was going to feed me content daily, and that content linked to a music store, they could pay me each time someone decided to click through and buy a song that they saw listed on my site. To do this, I logged into my Linkshare account and got hooked into the iTunes affiliate program which would pay me 5% of all sales generated. A nickel per song and 50 cents per album isn't much, but I am guessing that once a person downloads and begins using iTunes, they will spend upwards of $100 on music through iTunes over the lifetime of the program. Obviously in some cases more, and in some less, but there is potential to keep on earning as it seems unlikely for someone to purchase a single song and never return.

The RSS feeds are robust and very easy to customize by genre, category, etc and I was pleased at the ease with which they were spit out of the Apple system. I plugged them into my site and it was instant content with a revenue stream (albeit a small one) back-ended right into it. BRILLIANT. Then....horror. I tried some of the links on the site generated by the feed while I was on my machine at work and was given an error saying that "itms" is not a registered protocol. In short, the links are useless unless you have a working version of iTunes already installed on your machine. If you don't, linky no worky.

What is Apple thinking? Through this awful execution of the affiliate/rss program they are cutting off what must be nearly 50% of possible revenue and 100% of new customers that could be had via affiliate links. If Apple and Linkshare were smart, they would at the very least bounce out those that did not yet have a working version of iTunes to a page where they could download the program and purchase the song that they were looking for. In addition, an affiliate program that tracked the clickers purchasing activity over the life of their iTunes download and then rewarded the affiliate who initiated the download would be fantastic. A compromise would be for Apple to determine what the revenue generated is over the lifetime of an average iTunes download and then pay affiliates a flat fee per download initiated similar to the way many many other pay per download programs work.

No matter what the solution, they need to do something. I can't have links on my site that go dead if the user doesn't have iTunes already installed. I am all for pushing business to iTunes, but they need to meet me halfway here and provide some tools that make my making them money a bit easier.

Why Do You Hate PayPal?

And you do. On some level. You may use it, but my guess is you don't like it. I knew deep down that I didn't like it and I thought about why...

I am helping to organize a Madden Playstation tournament where the fee is five bucks. I am accepting payment online, using PayPal, and I have more complaints about PayPal than I have signups. This frustrated me a bit, as I didn't perceive paying via PayPal as being such a pain in the ass. I got mad at the people who didn't want to use PayPal. It's convenient, it' easy, anyone can do it....what the hell?

Once the anger settled, I thought about usability and the cornerstone of designing something that is usable. First you need to think of the lowest common denominator - the person going on the web for the very first time. Then you need to put your preconceived notions of what you think works aside, and listen to what the majority thinks, does, and says. If you curse out your users for being dumb when they can't figure out your site, and refuse to change because you think that your system is fine the way it is, you are dead in the water. Pack up and go home now, because it is over. I often have a hard time coming to this point - but this time around I did and I learned as a result. I think PayPal is fine. Others clearly do not. But why?

I dug some more, and I asked around. I went through the angry anti-PayPal emails from purchasers and I realized that it really has less to do with the actual product, but more to do with the perception of the product - the brand and how people identify it. Changing the whole brand identity is no small task, so I thought about how some small layout changes might help people get past what seem to be the typical roadblocks and abandonment points.

The biggest detractor on the purchaser side seems to be the misconception that you need a PayPal account in order to pay someone who is collecting via PayPal. I am not sure why people think that, as when you click through on a "pay by PayPal" link, you are given the option to login and pay from your existing PayPal account, or you can skip right by and just enter your credit card and billing information and be done. Although this seems painfully clear to me on the landing page, for some reason countless people seem to abandon at this point. Most likely because the ability to just pay using a credit card and no PayPal account is not made clear enough to the user. A simple change to the layout here may help this confusion. Perhaps PayPal should make the landing page be a single page with the billing and credit card information on one form. For those that may already have a PayPal account, a small link outside of the form prompting a login would suffice. If you are a PayPal user you more than likely know your way around by now and can deal with the smaller link for login. This change, in my opinion, would improve usability from the purchaser side dramatically. Users would hit that page and see instantly that they could enter CC and billing info into a single form on a single page and submit. Transaction over.

As it sits now, you enter personal information (shipping/billing info) on one page, and then credit card info on a following page. It isn't clear (or as clear as it could be) that this page is the same as any normal online credit card payment page and not part of the signup process for a PayPal account. It seems that for the most part, people do not want to get sidetracked and sign up for a payment system they have no interest in on the way to purchasing something. More than likely, they have already signed up somewhere else when shopping for the item they are about to purchase, and asking them to signup for something else just to pay for it doesn't sit well. Again, I understand that this is not what is happening, I am merely pointing out that at quick glance people seem to think that this is what is happening and abandon purchases at this point far more than they should.

To wrap...keep it simple, keep it clear, keep it on one page. And make it obvious that you don't need a PayPal account to pay someone who is collecting via PayPal. I don't want to give up on this product, but at the same time I also don't want to continue to lose sales because of it.

He Doesn't Look Like Someone With Gator

You can't always tell someone has Gator simply by looking at them. It could be your neighbor, your boss, your own sister. It can happen to anyone. It happened to me. I feel dirty. To me, Gator is like the internet version of an STD. You surf safely, you use protection, but all it takes is one wild moment of indescretion and downloading and you are infected. And sometimes there is no cure. It is embarassing, it is frustrating, you become afraid to surf the internet for a while, and it makes you uncomfortable. You want to talk to others who have Gator to see how they handle it. Some look for a cure, some choose to live with it and just take things one day at a time. There are mini support groups where some are offering help and advice, and others are just looking for someone to share their story with. My name is Andrew, and I have Gator.

San Francisco

So it has been about a week, and finally I feel like my body is getting back on track. Jet-lag, work-lag, booze-lag, sickness...it was a hell of a long week. But a ton of fun. For this trip to San Fran, I flew for the first time in about 2 years which was interesting. I am a good flyer, but it had been a while so I didnt know what to expect. Besides my ears bugging out big time on the decent into SFO and again into BOS, the flights were super smooth.

Once we hit thr ground in California, it was non-stop for five days. Lots of business, lots of cabs, and people, and food, and drinks, and random things and just crazy times.
A couple of observations about San Francisco:

• Lots of homeless, everywhere.
• Nobody jaywalks. Ever
• People were all very very friendly.
• 10 miles in any direction out of SF and you get 10 degrees warmer.
• Hilliest city I have ever been to. It is insane.
• I think I want to move there.

There is way more to tell about the trip, the show, etc. Check out the marketing vox blog for a good overview on the AD:Tech show, which was crazy.