Official Blog

Sunny greetings from Sunnyvale. Yesterday zanox co-hosted the WebPlay at PlugandPlayTechCenter. We kicked off the day with an European Business Breakfast. Besides the country managers introducing their regions, local markets and social media trends, there was still plenty of time for networking.
Later Thomas led a panel on Crowd Sourcing. Panelists Yaniv Ben-Saadon, CEO of Fixya and Fabien Degaugue, Founder & CEO of PeerPong talked about monetization of crowd sourcing platforms and the audience asked questions via twitter that the panel addressed such as: What motives the crowd?, What can’t be outsourced? and How does the crowd feel about companies making money out of them?
View all tweets here.

In the late afternoon everyone got together for German beer and German-style food for more networking and good music.

Overall this was another great event in Silicon Valley zanox participated in – thanks PlugandPlay-Team!

Just in time for the hot phase of the Christmas business, we have introduced faster payout periods for several hundred of our international top publishers. Starting now, they will receive payouts from their activities every 10 days up until 31 January 2010 – just as our publishers with an AdRank 6 or more do already. Partners who fulfill the criteria to benefit from our faster payout process have already received an e-mail from us.

Especially during peak seasons like Christmas, affiliate programmes with a short confirmation time are way more attractive to publishers than others. So also as an advertiser, you can benefit from speeding up your Christmas business: The faster you approve transactions, and the shorter you set your auto confirmation time, the more money your publishers can reinvest into promoting your programmes, and the more attractive your programmes and promotions will become for other publishers too.

Advertisers who reduce their confirmation time significantly may let us know, so that we can point our publishers especially to those programmes.

The confirmation time is also one criterion for our selected Christmas offers: The weekly round-up of the most promising campaigns helps publishers finding out which advertisers offer the most attractive Christmas promotions, which products promise the greatest success or which ad media will lead to the best conversions: http://affiliate.zanox.com/global/affiliate-programmes

Have a successful and profitable end-of-year business!

Today’s big news has probably reached many of you. We, Jens, Heiko and myself – the zanox board and founders – will leave zanox at the beginning of 2010 and will hand over to Phillip Justus, the new CEO of zanox. Last night we prepared an openBoard video message for you, and this episode wasn’t an easy one for us. We talked about why we will leave zanox, our upcoming plans and the future of zanox:

If you want to know more about Philipp and get some more details, also have a look at our press release. And of course, we’ll be around for a while – so there will be lots of time to discuss your questions in the next couple of weeks and months. So just stay tuned!

Now that we have a zanox Wiki for all our countries, we would like to invite all of you to contribute! Our Wiki is now easily accessible via our single sign-on solution zanox Connect.  So everyone with a zanox publisher account is now able to write, edit or translate with just one click.

So what’s the zanox Wiki all about? The zanox Wiki is our central knowledge base and serves as an extension of our network: Our Wiki holds precise explanations of all the terminology and processes surrounding our services and products, as well as general affiliate marketing topics. And since it’s all about collective intelligence, it’s not just gonna be us who maintain it, but we would also love to have your expertise to perpetually expand it.

Contributing is easier than you probably thought: You can easily become a contributor and share your knowledge with our community. Simply log-on to our network with your zanox Publisher account via zanox Connect and start writing, editing or translating.

Feel also free to use the Wiki’s discussion board to all Wiki-related questions and feedback. For all other questions or if you need help with anything, let our First Level Support know or use our support platform getsatisfaction.com

The zanox Wiki supports the following languages:

• English


• Deutsch


• Français


• Italiano


• Español


• Nederlands


• Polski


• Svenska


• Chinese

To reward you for your efforts we’re also working on a compensation programme for regular contributors and we’ll keep you up-to-date on this. We hope you enjoy working with the Wiki and sharing information!

As a European hub for start-up businesses, Berlin has made itself a name for hosting key events on entrepreneurship and venture capital. Yesterday, the Venture Lounge Berlin took place at the international congress center ICC and gave start-up founders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business angels the opportunity to touch-base. Our co-founder and CFO Heiko Rauch had been invited to talk about the early days of zanox and how the three Berlin graduates managed to turn their start-up into a truly global player before selling their successful business in 2007. On the same page, since many have asked us to let you know more about how it all started, we have added the feature “zanox: from start-up to global player – a Berlin success story” to our website. Read the full story here and find out why our founders lost a business plan competition to a sandwich-delivery service

So there is a lot of knowledge our founders are happy to share with the next generation of entrepreneurs. That’s why Heiko is attending the medienwoche@IFA, the media week as a part of the Berlin-based consumer electronics show IFA. Today, he will speak on a panel on “Investors wanted: next generation entrepreneurship”. If you are around and interested, just drop by at the ICC today at 16:30.

Update: Here are some more impressions of medienwoche@ifa and the panel discussion Heiko took part in:

Today, we would like to introduce you to zanox openBoard, a new web video feature part of  zanox.TV. With openBoard we – the zanox board – would like to give you regular insights into our company’s mind, developments and upcoming news.

Why did we decide to come up with the zanox openBoard idea in the first place? It all began with an e-mail we wrote to all our zanox employees, asking each of them to create zanox 2.0. Here is a bit of what we wrote:

“We can’t help but realise that our zanox world is changing faster and faster. There is a new ‘open & collaborative’ culture coming, which we also want to implement within zanox. That’s why, from today on, we want to share our thoughts and ideas about the future with all of you and ask you to contribute and participate!”

We thought we’d go ahead and set an example on how we think this open development could be accelerated. So from now on we would like to keep you updated on what’s going on within zanox via our openBoard web TV episodes.

Enjoy watching – we hope you like it!

Thomas, Heiko & Jens

Since some of you have asked us to post some pictures of our new Silicon Valley Campus, our colleague Chris Loonan has done a little photo shoot in Sunnyvale. Please pay attention to how lovely he arranged the cactus trees and orchids And by the way, if you want to know more about either zanox Campus, Berlin, Silicon Valley or Milan, or would like to get in contact to book it, have a look at our new Campus page.

So here are a few impressions of our Silicon Valley Campus – enjoy!

Many of you have probably already read today’s news on our shareholders’ acquisition of Digital Window:  Axel Springer and PubliGroupe announced their investment in Digital Window, the holding company of Affiliate Window, a leading UK affiliate network. With a share of 50.1 %, Axel Springer and PubliGroupe are now the majority shareholders of digital window.

Although we as zanox are not involved in our shareholders’ new acquisition, we would like to provide you with a few answers to questions that you might be asking yourself:

Does the new acquisition have any impact on zanox UK ?
zanox and Digital Window will remain to be two separate companies, both owned by our shareholders. This means that this decision will not have any impact on our UK subsidiary: zanox UK will remain untouched, as well as the team and its management. Therefore, our UK businesses will run as usual and will not be affected in any way. However, we will evaluate how zanox and Digital Window might cooperate and look out for possible synergies.

How could a possible cooperation between zanox UK and Digital Window look like?
The zanox board welcomes our shareholders’ decision and considers it as an opportunity to further strengthen our market position in the UK: We believe that Digital Window has the potential to become a strong cooperation partner of zanox UK , for example by joining our Global Alliance Partner (GAP) programme.

Why did Axel Springer again decide on a joint venture with PubliGroupe?
The joint venture both our shareholders agreed on with the acquisition of zanox has proven to be a successful step. The positive experiences Axel Springer and PubliGroupe have made with us now led to a second joint investment in Digital Window.

Again, we are glad to see that our shareholders made the investment and are looking forward to a successful cooperation with Digital Window. We hope that this already answered some of the most important questions, but of course let us know if there is anything else you’d like to know.

Twittering has become so much more than just answering the question “What you are doing?” – especially for businesses. Of course it’s probably quite entertaining to let you know that somebody just suggested painting our coffee machine orange or that the Web Services team just scored at the after-work table football match in our Campus (that was probably just luck anyway ). But for us as a business, Twitter is all about listening and, at the same time, reaching out to the community.

So Twitter is a great way for us to keep up to date with what the international affiliate marketing industry is talking about. It’s all about people, their ideas, needs and perception of latest trends – and there are quite a lot! And of course, all companies are interested to see what people think and talk about them, no doubt. So Twitter is a perfect way to listen to and, at the same time, reach out to a large number of people in our business. Sure, there is promotion on Twitter, but we think that it’s an easy and direct way for you to keep updated on what’s new.

Since by now we have established several different and also local Twitter Accounts, we thought that it’s a good idea to give you an overview of our zanox Tweets:

twitter.com/zanox: Our first zanox Twitter account: It’s in English, international and, similar to our blog, keeps you up to date on what’s going on within the online marketing industry and our company.

twitter.com/zanox_affiliate: zanox_affiliate bundles all international news on the latest afffiliate programmes.

Our zanox country Tweets provide you with updates on local company news and also on the latest afffiliate programmes in your country:

And last but not least, we love to set up Twitter walls during our events, so everybody gets a chance to  comment on panel discussions or ask questions during a Q & A sessions. Oh, and tweets are also a great indicator on whether a party rocked or not: If there are tweets coming in around eight in the morning on the day after, it didn’t seem to be all that great – so glad our zanox Summer Party after-tweets sounded more like “Almost noon, time to get up eventually, still dizzy but wow – thanks, zanox for the amazing party last night!” Now that’s feedback we love to receive

TechCrunch Europe just launched the Top 100 Index, a constantly updated index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. We were really proud to see that zanox made it among the TOP 10! “We think that our efforts in pushing forward on innovative developments within the affiliate marketing industry strongly contribute to the company’s progress, which is well reflected by the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index,” our CEO Thomas Hessler says. “With the zanox Application Store and the $2 Mio Application Store Contest we are tapping the creativity of our network’s collective intelligence: Benefiting everyone involved is what we consider as the key to success of any ambitious tech company.”

Compiled by TechCrunch Europe and the start-up success indicator YouNoodle, the index is focused on mobile and web companies and covers the broad Europe, Middle East and Africa region (EMEA). “We wanted to use a data-led approach to create a list which could start to throw up both the themes and the diversity of this rich marketplace,” Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe writes. “We hope the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 will help throw some light on the European companies that are generating strong, genuine progress.” You can also read more about the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index here.

Most of our publishers already received the great news about our next “VIP welcome” advertiser herrenausstatter.de. Their partner programme is now marked with the VIP welcome logo within our network:

We talked to Christoph Hofmann, member of the board and responsible for Marketing and Sales at the DePauli AG, about the zanox VIP club:

What was your motivation to apply as a VIP welcome Advertiser?

Christoph Hofmann: “When we first were told about the possibility of being a part of the zanox VIP Club by our Affiliate Marketing agency explido WebMarketing, we were directly convinced by this idea. We are confident about this opportunity to boost our Affiliate Programme by working together with new Top-Publishers and the included advertising efforts.”

What do you think are your main advantages as a VIP welcome Advertiser?

Christoph Hofmann: “One of our main advantages is the cooperation with new high-performance Affiliates. In consequence of a couple of promotion activities by zanox we also reach a higher state of perception within the network helping us establishing many other promising co-operations.”

As a VIP welcome Advertiser, what advantages do the publishers get when they cooperate with you?

Christoph Hofmann: “Promoting herrenausstatter.de implies taking benefit from the high conversion rates of one of Germany’s top online fashion stores. We offer only the newest collections of over 100 leading fashion brands, such as BOGNER, Strellson, Tommy Hilfiger, René Lezard, Calvin Klein, Levi’s and many more. Furthermore we provide customer benefits like free shipping and a 30 day cash back guarantee.”

Is there any other message you would like to give to our publishers?

Christoph Hofmann: “First I want to thank our Publishers for their great support so far. Although we are trying best to give you sale-increasing advertising material, attractive commissions and good technical support – there is always something left to improve. So do not hesitate calling our Affiliate Managers at explido WebMarketing to tell them your wishes or ideas.”

The zanox partner programme herrenausstatter.de is managed by the agency explido WebMarketing. Michael Gemeiner from explido about the zanox VIP club:

As an agency, do you think the VIP Club is a good way to enhance the relationship between advertisers and publishers?

Michael Gemeiner: “A good relationship between advertisers and publishers is one of our main goals in our daily work. The zanox VIP Club offers publishers some really good additional features like a faster payout, no cancellations of sales and commissions. On the other hand advertisers get new co-operations with high performance publishers, so there is a win-win-situation for both sides.”

More information about the zanox VIP Club and “VIP welcome” advertisers are available on the VIP Club landing page and in our Official Blog.

Last week, we officially opened our new zanox facilities in Milan with a little office warming event and guests from the Italian and international online marketing scene. Before the party we invited key journalists to learn about the latest developments within zanox and the market including local and international market trends,  zanox Web Services, the zanox Application Store and the $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest. For those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend, but are curious of how our lovely new Milan office looks like, here are some pictures of the event. You can also read more on our zanox Italy Blog – in Italian of course

We are really proud to announce the launch of our new zanox Blog France: http://blog.zanox.com/fr/france

Get the latest news, trends and opinions on the French Market – also via Twitter: http://twitter.com/zanox_fr

Enjoy!

After the launch of our VIP Club we are very proud to announce the first zanox “VIP welcome” advertisers discount24 and Jamba, a brand of von Fox Mobile Distribution, with their German partner programme www.jamba.de.

These partner programmes fulfill high quality criteria – that is why they received the status “VIP welcome” and will be highlighted with a logo within our network. You can find the logo in the programme information next to the zanox AdRank:

We talked to discount24 and Jamba about their motivation to become a zanox “VIP welcome” advertiser, and how publishers can benefit from working with them:

Nicolas Borsum, Head of Online Marketing at discount24 GmbH & Co. KG:

What were your first thoughts when you heard about zanox VIP Club?
Nicolas Borsum: “We see the VIP programme as a good opportunity to realize the co-operation with strong and high-quality partners, and to emphasize our quality demands for our programme.”

What was your motivation to apply as a VIP welcome Advertiser?
Nicolas Borsum: “Getting in contact with Key Publishers for our business model to enable a sustainable co-operation in the long run. Through the VIP status discount24 intends to increase the attractiveness of the programme for Publishers. Assuming that the VIP co-operation allows long-term partnerships, publishers can invest more time in the development of the programme without taking any risks.”

How do you profit from being a VIP welcome Advertiser? What are your benefits?
Nicolas Borsum: “We consider it to be an advantage for publishers as well as for us. In the provision model as well as with technical guidelines both sides obtain a basis to ensure good results. We expect more exclusive applications through the VIP Publishers and therefore increasing sales for both sides.”

What are the advantages for Publishers co-operating with you as a VIP welcome Advertiser?
Nicolas Borsum: “We co-operate closely with the VIP Publishers and respond to their needs concerning advertising material, product data, coupons etc. Our goal is to achieve the highest conversion rates possible for our publishers. The general conditions should enable prosperous collaboration for all parties involved.”

Janine Jansen, Affiliate Marketing Manager for the brand Jamba at Fox Mobile Distribution:

What were your first thoughts when you heard about zanox VIP Club?
Janine Jansen: “My first thought was: We should be part of that! We were immediately convinced of the idea of zanox VIP Club, which provides its members with attractive programmes including above-average features. Nowadays, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish oneself from the mainstream of other partner programmes and to compete for the best publishers. The zanox VIP Club opens up new opportunities for us.”

What was your motivation to apply as a VIP welcome Advertiser?
Janine Jansen: “In the context of our longtime international partnership with zanox we established a high quality affiliate programme over the years. It is a very particular honour to receive a VIP status for the partner programme of www.jamba.de from such a qualified partner. We thereby extend our already close partnership and at the same time achieve a higher visibility and appeal for our brand Jamba within the zanox network.”

How do you profit from being a VIP welcome Advertiser? What are your benefits?
Janine Jansen: “As a VIP welcome Advertiser we have the opportunity to extend our group of competent, professional and reliable publishers and thus reach even more partners. In this way, we can achieve a continuous increase of our conversions as well as a higher sales volume for all parties involved in the Jamba partner programme. The status of being a VIP welcome Advertiser results in stronger communication of our programme within the network and enables us to establish further close and successful co-operations.”

What are the advantages for publishers co-operating with you as a VIP welcome Advertiser?

Janine Jansen: “Promoting Jamba means to benefit from the high conversion rates of a strong brand. To achieve the greatest possible success we therefore provide our publishers with innovative conversion-increasing  advertising material. Additionally, we are constantly working on the improvement of our technical features.With the generator „Smart CO-IN“ publishers can easily create and integrate our contextual advertising material.
Furthermore, we offer very attractive premium conditions to our high-performing affiliates. The personal and individual support of our affiliates as well as their views are very important to us. Only together we can build our programme as attractive as possible. As a matter of course we ensure a fast approval of applications, real-time sales confirmation and also enhanced policies for traffic, tracking and SEM.”

More information about the zanox VIP Club can be found on our VIP Club Landing Page.

Since we received so much great and lovely feedback on our new “WE ARE… ZANOX!” film, we thought of also sharing the picture we took during our video shoot. So here we have the still of the final scene – you could also make a game out of it and try to spot your favourite zanox employee in less than ten seconds Enjoy!

Last night, almost a thousand people experienced the world premiere of our new zanox film “WE ARE… ZANOX!” during our fabulous zanox Summer Party in Berlin! And you guys are a great partycrowd! As our presenter Alfonso pointed out when he announced the film last, zanox parties are always loud and fun: The location, the club Spinder & Klatt right at the river Spree, was simply perfect, our BBQ was delicious and – most importantly – everybody was happy!

Party pics will follow soon – but first, here is our film “WE ARE… ZANOX!” Thanks a lot to everybody, who helped us producing this great piece! We hope you like it as much as we do! Enjoy watching and thanks again for making the zanox Summer Party a great night for everyone!

It was the biggest video shoot we’ve ever had: Yesterday, we gathered more than 100  zanox employees right at the river Spree for what we expect will be the highlight of our new zanox film (yet a surprise!). The Web Services office turned into the high-tech camera set with a massive window crane. Animators, directors, cameramen, photographers and many helpers were around all day to make all this happen. Big thanks to Laliaflia. And our employees proved to be potential movie stars!  We are already very excited about the final result, which will be presented next week during our zanox Summer Party, the world’s biggest and hottest Publisher party! To give you some first insights, here are some impressions of the big shoot:

Last week we signed our agreement with the Plug&PlayTechCenter in Sunnyvale, CA, at the Plug&Play Expo over there. From 1 June 2009 we will have a zanox pavillion with eight desks and one meeting area. It will be located right next to the Apple AppStore & Stanford University co-op and our colleague Chris Loonan will move over from our New York office. It was quite exiting to see all the positive feedback and reactions we got from all the participants we talked to at the Expo conference. No surprise they specially liked our monetization 2.0 t-shirts. They had 90 VC´s attending and 40 start-ups pitching. Those pitches were a very strong statement of the enormous creativity and brain power that comes out of the Valley. We now hope to participate in this and use the collective intelligence to generate and co-create new ideas and apps for our zanox Application Store. Have a look at the short video I took to get an impression of the event and the location:

The people who run the center are absolutly amazing! They welcomed us very warmly and I hardly saw a team with a more positive spirit. Big thanks again to Kayvan, Saeed, Jupe, Candace and Jacky. You guys are great!

So, if anybody is interested to meet us over there or to use our facilities please get in contact and we will discuss opportunities.

Following the great success of our Berlin-based zanox Campus, we now decided to open a second Campus in the heart of Silicon Valley! It will serve as a new open meeting point for publishers, start-up businesses and developers. Designed as a Think Tank for modern web-based business models, projects and partners in Silicon Valley, we created it to support new online talents. We would also like to use both Campuses, Berlin and Silicon Valley, as an open exchange space for all our partners across the US and Europe.

With our first US-based zanox Campus, we would like to invite the creative community in Silicon Valley to help us promote and pursue innovation within our industry. In return, we will offer access to our affiliate network’s infrastructure, our partners and last but not least attractive investment opportunities for the most promising business models. This is where our just recently launched  $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest comes in.

If you are interested in learning more, just drop by from 5 pm onwards today at the Plug & Play TechCenter in San Francisco: Our CEO Thomas Hessler will officially announce the new zanox Campus during the cocktail reception. Some first pics and impressions are to follow shortly! Hope to see you in the Valley soon!

An exclusive club for our Very Important Partners: We are thrilled to announce the launch of the zanox VIP Club today!  The zanox VIP Club is an exclusive programme for the highest-profile publishers in our network. It’s been designed for our top-performing, professional publishers and offers even better opportunities for your revenue growth and transparent, exclusive partnerships.

Our zanox VIP Publishers will exclusively receive attractive benefits from selected advertisers, such as the automatic approval of programme applications, a short-term approval for leads and sales or a guaranteed confirmation rate. In order to be selected as a VIP, publishers have to fulfil strong quality criteria, which you can have a look at in detail here.

Indeed we put very high-level standards and strong quality criteria on our zanox VIP Club – which is because we want to enhance the level of transparency for all partners within our network even more. We believe that this will take the quality of our network to a new dimension, which is yet unique within the industry!

You might spot the new zanox VIP Club logo at some place in our user interface now, which is a mark of distinction for our zanox VIP Publishers. But it’s not only our publishers who can join the zanox VIP Club – our advertisers are invited to apply as a “VIP welcome” advertiser in order to be sure of cooperating only with the most profitable, reputable and highest-quality publishers within the network.

For more information on the zanox VIP Club, check out our VIP landing page and the VIP Club Q&A on the zanox Wiki. Hope to welcome some of you soon too in the zanox VIP Club!