Dennis over at Wap Review is hosting this month’s carnival of the mobilists and he’s featured the mobyaffiliates Mobile Affiliate Marketing Opportunities Presentation.   The Carnival is a roundup of the week’s best mobile-related blogging and this week features some great posts on the ipad, appstores and more.

There’s a decent article over at the aceaffiliates.com site which

“Mobile affiliate marketing: Get Ready for a Revolution”

This article makes the case the mobile is going to be a key channel for affiliate marketing.

“Affiliate marketing through mobile phones is going to be huge soon.  Because, to make a long story short:

– 3G phones with broadband-caliber Web browsing capabilities are multiplying like rabbits.
– Americans are flat-out addicted to their mobile devices.
– People from other countries are even more flat-out addicted to their mobile devices.”

The article makes a good point that in a few years, when m-commerce is established the market will be crowded, so now is the time to get involved.

“Five years from now, when mobile devices are well-established as a sales channel with millions of consumers buying stuff right off their phone every single day, the bandwagon will be a crowded and chaotic one.  The time to start thinking long and hard about mobile affiliate marketing is now, when the bandwagon is plodding along serenely but steadily. “

Great advice and good to see more and more people are noticing the potential of mobile as an affiliate channel.

Simon over at welovemobile did a great post on mobile affiliate marketing a while back that’s it’s well worth pointing out again.

“Internet affiliate marketing is a massive multi-billion dollar industry, from bedroom set-ups to multinationals, huge amounts of internet transactions are being facilitated through affiliate networks. Earlier this year, NMA reported that mobile affiliate marketing was a little way off, seeing as buying on the mobile internet was not yet commonplace.

What the NMA didn’t mention was that both the online adult content industry and the online gambling industry have been seriously into mobile for some time and that pure mobile generated revenues are on the increase. Mobile adult content is big business, and mobile affiliate schemes for this sector have been around for a while, but mobile gambling outfits (both pure-play mobile companies and PC web transfers) are now increasingly trying to grab a slice of what many people believe will be a massive industry.”

Simon goes on to give a really great in-depth look at the mobile affiliate marketing sector with respect to mobile casino affiliate programs, and says:

“The commercial model is simple, mobile affiliates are paid for the gamblers they refer to the casinos. One model is a fixed sum per player sign-up, the other is a slice of the gambling revenues from the players they refer. The amounts paid to affiliates vary widely, from £12 to £40 per signup to 30-60% of gambling revenues. I have heard some in the industry claim that mobile casino’s are prepared to pay up to £80 per acquisition and new players are valuable enough to warrant TV advertising (Probability recently aired TV spots in the UK for its Mobile only Ladyluck casino). There is certainly gold in them there hills……”

Mobile casino is definitely one of the leading sectors in mobile affiliate marketing at the moment, if not THE leading sector.  In the abscence of other verticals like travel and finance it is leading the way.  For more go on over to welovemobile and read the rest of the article.

I found this article by Online Revenue News with some interesting “thoughts and speculation on mobile internet affiliate marketing. The author CT Moore points out that mobile affiliate marketing might be completely different from affiliate marketing on the PC web and much more based around real world interactions:

“Through technologies such as GPS, NFC, and LBS, the mobile web will close the gap between online/digital and physical interaction, merging digital experiences with physical spaces and experiences. In fact, Web 3.0 may not be the semantic web, but a mobile one that’s part physical and part digital.

One of the ways in which it will likely do this is through downloadable apps, and I think that networks, software providers, and affiliates all need to start considering how those apps fit into the affiliate marketing model. For example, affiliates might build app directories and make a rev-share on every app download they generate.

Also, GPS, NFC, and LBS seem to have the potential to bring mobile affiliate marketing together with offline affiliate marketing. After all, if affiliates can receive commissions for the offline sales they generate, there’s really no reason why they couldn’t make commissions on targeting users with nearby promotions.”

It’s something well worth remembering that mobile affiliate marketing opportunities might be completely new – the type of things that just can’t be done from a fixed internet connection.  For example, linking affiliate marketing to scanning barcodes in shops. CT Moore agrees:

“Exactly how mobile affiliate marketing is going to look, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure; it’s not going to be as straight-forward as the current web. Rather, it’s going to require that affiliates and the programs that they promote reach out to users not only where they are, but based on where they are.”

Great article and very thought provoking.  Mobile internet marketers need to think beyond the PC to build this new business.

Geno Prussakov is another affiliate marketing blogger to notice the potential of the mobile internet for affiliate marketers.  He says:

It seems that mobile is both one of the less crowded affiliate marketing arenas, yet one of the fastest developing ones out there. The total number of mobile Internet users in the U.S. has grown from an average of 10,821 unique users a day in January 2008 to 22,369 a day in January 2009 [source], largely due to the rapid rise of iPhone’s popularity and use [source]. Some state that iPhones are generating 67% of total mobile Internet traffic [source], while others place BlackBerries and other smartphones much higher in rankings than iPhone [source]. Smartphones or iPhones, the facts are obvious — the mobile Internet’s popularity is growing, and marketers still have plenty of opportunities there.

Geno goes on to point out that dealing with mobile search engines is a difficult business but that this is a “largely untapped area”.   You can read the rest of the post here.  Again, great to see more affiliate marketing people seeing that the future is on mobile !

The affiliate marketer Missyward is predicting that 2010 will be the year where mobile affiliate marketing hits the big time. She says,

“with the popularity of smartphones increasing (along with download speeds), I believe 2010 may finally be the year where mobile marketing takes off and affiliate marketers really leverage this virtually untapped market.”

Mainstream affiliates are starting to pick up on the potential of mobile as a channel.  However, at the moment affiliate marketing on mobile is totally different from on the PC web so many of them are in for a hard time trying to make money.  Kudos to Missyward for predicting this trend though – you can check out more posts on her blog2010 .