There is a wonderful rumour floating about that AOL and MSN are currently contemplating running away together.

This would be a blow to Google which has for some time now been the bed-mate of AOL-search.

Many people see this as the best way for the under dog Microsoft (i suppose its not a typo) to increase its share of the search engine market. If these two decide to consumate a deal MSN will command 18% of the search engine market.

My Opinion: The more competition for Google in its core business the better. Since almost every user of the internet starts his or her session with a visit to a popular search engine its best if there is not a single dominant portal.

Why?: Organic search efforts targetted at multiple engines will yield higher results, right now most people optimize for google. If this deal happens those that optimize for MSN will reap new found rewards.

Suggested Reading: NY Times AOL MSN Article

In an industry choked with arrogance and ego I am pleased to see that there are still a few level headed affilate program owners online.

Recently i received an email from Bill at Porn Mega Bucks In it he states how he made an emotional decision in error by removing free hosted galleries being used by affiliates.

Simply removing those galleries was his response to the 2257 threat.

He could have just kept quiet and stole as much as he could while at the same time posting a message or some such which stated what we was doing. This would have allowed him to increase his revenue while at the same time giving him the protection of having made an attempt to inform webmasters.

Instead he has made a vow to repay affiliates for the error, i have no doubt he will make good on that pledge.

For those interested the letter is attached below, Otherwise.

Thats all for now!

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Hello all,

Recently in auditing our hosted galleries I came across some that I
could not get my hands on the docs from the content publishers. Since
right now we have exactly ZERO images in our member areas (we are
using a bunch of image gallery plugins from various providers).

I kind of freaked out in a panic stricken way and renamed the galleries
that had content we would not be able to get IDs from the publishers /
vendors.

That would have taken surfers to a regular ole 404 page except for the
fact that I changed the .htaccess some time ago to take 404s to AFF. (I
was sending several domains to various programs on the 404s when
June 23rd rolled around because I had sites so old that the content
providers were selling production stills and wouldn’t be able to provide
IDs for any of that, so rather than fix the sites with new content, I
deleted them) I deleted 1000s of sites, many of the AVS sites. I had
some of those sites on the hosted gallery domain.

An extremely stupid error on my part and I will think of a way to fully
compensate those that were sending traffic to my panic mode fuck up.

I couldn’t steal from someone and sleep right, so please accept this as
a formal apology.

I’m working on the hosted galleries with new content to get them all
back working again this week, next week early at the latest if I hump it.

I’m very embarrassed, and very sorry.

Thanks

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BillPMB
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