On July 31st the Google Affiliate Network GAN) closed-down. In terms of Second Life, the significance of this is that Linden Lab offered their own affiliate advertising through GAN. However, all is not lost for those who wish to advertise SL through their websites with the potential to generate modest income as a result of doing so, a fact Ciaran Laval pointed me towards.
The Lab has entered into a relationship with Commission Junction (who have themselves been running a programme to capture advertisers and publishers who had been using GAN) to provide a new affiliate service to those wishing to advertise Second Life on their websites.
Recently the Lab has been e-mailing those already using the affiliate programme with details on how they can make the switch. For those who have not previously used the affiliate programme and wish to do so for the first time can do so in one of two ways depending on whether or not you already have a publisher account with Commission Junction.
If you do not have a publisher account with Commission Junction, you can sign-up using the form linked-to from the Lab’s affiliate programme page. Do note, however that the form represents a contract between you and Commission Junction, not Linden Lab. As such, the Terms of Service displayed as a part of the sign-up process is for Commission Junction (and their associated entities) as well, and therefore should be read through. It would also likely be a good idea to check the Commission Junction website for further background information (details on how the system works for publishers, payout terms, etc.).
Once the sign-up form has been submitted, an e-mail will be sent with instructions on how to activate your new Commission Junction account.
If you do already have a Commission Junction publisher account, you can apparently add Second Life to your account via the Commission Junction member’s area.
Either way, please take the time to read the Lab’s initial FAQ on the affiliate programme page as it includes some important information on the programme – including the fact web sites based in the US states of Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina are excluded, presumably for tax liability reasons.
As I’m on WordPress.com, this programme is not for me – but if you self-host, and want to add SL advertising to your site, it might be for you. Commission Junction has a large number of advertisers, so there is no reason why you cannot include other suitable ads as well in order to try to increase your opportunities for revenue generation. Apparently, the minimum payout amount is considered high, so as with everything of this nature, mileage is liable to vary as to the return gained through the programme when all factors (traffic, ad selection, etc.) are taken into account.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Just moved to Commission Junction 🙂 LL’s approval takes just a few hours. To make things even simpler, I use a plugin which deals with all sorts of possible ad sources and manages them from an integrated backend; it automatically recognises the HTML for Commission Junction, and I can use it inside a widget — in fact, just as I use the same plugin for Google AdSense ads. Unfortunately, that plugin seems to be a bit old, and has been removed from the WordPress library, so I’m not telling you which one it is. My point is just that there are plenty of plugins that do pretty much the hard work of integrating ads from whatever source inside the widget areas, and they make everything much easier to use!
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Thanks for the feedback :).
It’s at times like this I regret not going directly with WordPress.org & self-hosting from the start (especially as WordPress.com features ads in my blog – I just don’t see them when logged-in myself). As it is, traffic volumes are such that I’m not toally enamoured with the idea of transferring to self-hosting and then working to rebuild the numbers and get recognised by something like CJ. I have the option of going with WordPress.com WordAds, although that still won’t let me advertise SL, which would be a nice-to-have.
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Well, for the record, I never see ads on your blog, Inara 🙂 Maybe it’s because I’m usually logged in at WordPress.com when I view it, I don’t know…
As for self-hosting… it has its advantages and disadvantages, the biggest disadvantage being the extra time spent tweaking with the underlying server to provide better performance (if you’re able to tweak it) or yelling at tech support when performance degrades (if you don’t get full access to your own server, but just to a control panel), and, of course, there is an associated cost…
There used to be networks of SL residents gathering together and pooling some money to self-host their own blogs running on the same server. I have no idea if there are still people around doing that (I “inherited” one Portuguese-speaking SL blog which was orphaned when one of those networks collapsed).
I’d be happy to give you an account and as much free disk space & bandwidth on DreamHost, if you wish to try it out, but I’m afraid you won’t be impressed with the performance, compared to WordPress.com. For my “main” sites, I use a cheap virtual private server, which is custom-tailored for the amount of traffic I get — that’s why I can get away with a “cheap” service 🙂 If you leave WordPress.com and are looking for an alternative which is easy to manage and has even more performance, you’ll be probably going to look for things like Page.ly or WP Engine, which are high-end WP self-hosting solutions with incredible performance, security, and ease of configuration — but they’re also quite expensive!
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