Sunday Chatter – 3/28

Give the Gift of an iPhone App

You can now send an iPhone app to someone as a gift. Apple made the change this week in iTunes where the “Gift This App” option is now present next to “Buy App.” You simply enter your e-mail address, along with the recipient’s address and buy it for them. You can only buy apps for people in the same country as you, so if you’re in Canada, buying someone in the U.S. an app isn’t possible. This is obviously due to some apps having country restrictions based on licensing agreements, etc.

Can You Monetize Chatroulette?

Chatroulette is taking the Internet by storm lately, just as MySpace and Facebook did in their early days. Although, unlike those two websites, Chatroulette is pretty much bare bones. If you aren’t already familiar with it, Chatroulette shows two video screens and a chat box. One of those screens is your web cam and the other randomly connects you with a stranger somewhere in the world. Just like every other popular social networking site, Internet marketers look at how they can monetize it and use this to their advantage. Zac Johnson posed that very question this week and pointed out a single text link on the site for a dating service. Could this be the first we see of Chatroulette going commercial? How can we as Internet marketers leverage on using the demographics to our advantage? I predict this is just the early stages of a very lucrative market.

Affiliate Marketing Tax — How to Survive It

The issue of affiliates paying tax on their earnings is a confusing one. Who really has the responsibility of keeping the Tax Man in the loop about earnings … the affiliate or the affiliate network? Amazon has dropped its affiliates based in Colorado, Rhode Island and North Carolina after new laws were passed regarding sales tax. Amazon’s decision on whether to pull its affiliate program out of New York is still pending. You don’t want to get caught up in the mess between the State and an affiliate network, so there are a couple things you can do to avoid the issue altogether. I’m not saying avoid paying taxes, because that would be illegal, I’m saying there are options you have, such as flipping your affiliate website, replacing merchants or trying out a different revenue model. Lynn Terry and ClickNewz.com addressed this issue more in depth earlier this week with her members.

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