By Robert Duijneveld

YNOT EUROPE – This year’s Eurowebtainment trade show offered some interesting revelations. Normally, for us the important aspects are renewing contacts, face-to-face meetings, exchanging ideas and working as a team outside our normal environment, but the show always provides business opportunities while enjoying fun in the sun.

The first thing I observed after arriving around midnight on Wednesday was some innocent smokers slowly being attacked by other smokers who involuntarily had become non-smokers. The latter descended upon the former like sharks, approaching in ever-smaller circles the guys still in possession of fags.

It turned out that nowhere in the vicinity of the hotel were cigarettes available after midnight. I think there’s an opportunity for EWT organizers to introduce the “EWT smoking sponsor.” Controversial, unethical and I guess just the way lots of us like it.

The next day I attended the webmaster panel discussion with Nick und Dirk and of course host Thommy, because I hoped that webmasters in the audience and on the dais would give us feedback about what they expect, what they want and what they need from an affiliate program. The most important thing I learned was that whatever we come up with, we should distribute it carefully and in a measured way.

Now, I know you probably think I’m talking about security and professional trade secrets here, but no, what webmasters really want quality over quantity. When we as content producers and site owners think “let’s make a lot of promotion tools for our webmasters and keep them happy” and subsequently dump into affiliates’ account or email boxes 100 new landing pages, links, banners, etc., the following appears to happen:

The webmaster finds his account flooded with new stuff and gets so intimidated by the sheer quantity of it all, that instead of promoting our sites more, he is reluctant to do make any changes at all.

In listening to affiliates, I also discovered that the average webmaster prefers to work short hours, and in these few hours there simply is no time to process and take advantage of a bunch of new material. The better idea, it seems is to add drops to the bucket every week than to overfill the vessel every few months.

For us, one of the goals in attending EWT was “officially” to introduce our new mobile platform and mobile affiliate program, adultXpand. We were happy with how the project was received: The response was very positive and some nice collaborations and partnerships were formed right there at the show.

Coincidence, or good timing? The EWT magic word was indeed “mobile,” which proved fortuitous for us. No matter what application, the first question on everyone’s lips seemed to be, “Is it available for mobile?” Our program is specially developed for mobile. It will only run on mobile devices, but it works on all of them.

In general, it seems that all the old tricks that have played out on the web years ago have been dusted off and are being reintroduced as the latest mobile trend. It’s interesting how things can change: A year ago hardly anybody, besides SMS call centers, seemed to be interested in the mobile space, and now everyone wants a piece of it.

Another big topic of conversation at EWT revolved around the developments associated with the dot-xxx sponsored Top Level Domain. The controversy regarding the need, the usability, the way the system is structured continues, and I think the main question is whether to ignore the whole thing or give in to the pressure to protect our current holdings in other spaces. Despite the way dot-xxx constantly is presented as a “win-win-win” scenario, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Unfortunately I missed out on the finger food during the pirate ball as well on the big barbecue the night before. That was sort of a pity, because we were starving and ended up having a midnight supper in the small, greasy bar and restaurant opposite the hotel. On a positive note, we discovered the bar does offer cigarettes in vending machines. We’ll ask the owner next year whether we can hang an adultXpand poster there. Official EWT Smoking Sponsor, the adultXpand affiliate program.