What will Tradedoubler do with The IMW Group?

The synergies aren’t obvious, aside from the cross-selling. I wonder if TD have bought IMW to beef up so they’re more attractive themselves for a potential purchase. The price for IMW was fairly reasonable compared to some of the valuations we’ve seen in the market lately.

I don’t see first generation bid management tools like Bidbuddy offering much to a sophisticated affiliate.

Thanks for the comment Jonathan and it’s great to get your point of view. I know TD are putting out the PR message saying they are not up for sale anymore but I tend to agree with your point about beefing up to prepare for another offer.

I don’t know too much about bidbuddy so it’s interesting that you don’t rate it highly.

Beefing themselves up for a ripe takeover as suggested is one possiblity as previously mentioned.

Offering service to affiliates would be a plus who have not developed their own in house tool this area.

However, I wonder if we shall see a trend with networks basically doing what affiliates do, either themselves or within their closed circles of affiliates for that controlling of the collective.

With lack of answers generally provided by a stock market listed plc’s without having to go through various channels of approval & authentication, we have to make our inferred comments.

Potentially, interesting purchase though to keep an out on.

You raise some interesting points.

This move will hit affiliates hard as tradedoubler will not care about existing affiliates as much (not that they have much respect for them as it is – advertisers run the show) with the search works getting all the love and affiliates shunted to the sidelines. Tradedoubler doesn’t need affiliates as much any more as they can use the search works to advertise clients.

What do others think?

I see there are some fears about TD stepping on the toes of its own affiliate network. But isn’t one of the justifications of affiliates doing PPC that they can exploit more niches, be more dynamic etc than an advertiser or their agency could be themselves? If TD shunted out affiliates wouldn’t that argument fall apart?

Jonathan, that’s a fair point in one way but I think “exploit more niches” can sometimes mean clean up the scraps. Agencies have often been keeping affiliates off the display url or away for the top keywords just to make their life easier and their profit margins higher.

I think Moose is right too and that we could see TD acting more like the super affiliates it has created.

I feel a lot of the networks are moving towards a bespoke agency model, it would make sense to me, if I were a network, to offer additional services to merchants. Affiliates will be used to plug the gaps that the other marketing initiatives offered by a network have not reached. Whist it makes sense to me and keeping in mind not all merchants will be able to afford the additional service, if this is what is being planned, I worry that too many fingers in too many pies will lead to a conflict of interest with regards to their own clients from within the same sector.

Actually, as a general thought, if we really drilled down, a lot of aff networks already compete with affiliates at some level, which is just wrong, but we allow them to do this. If I were an affiliate today, I would be selecting my aff networks very carefully, as not all drops in traffic and sales is necessarily to do with SE Algo changes.

Thanks for the comment Jess – it’s good to get your perspective.

It really is going to be an interesting period of time with networks becoming agencies etc and UK affiliate marketing being so dominated by PPC. Your recent blog post and thread on a4u have really got me thinking!