Award season is well and truly upon us. The Oscar nominations are due, some bingo sites have done some back scratching, the IGB Affiliate Awards have passed and nominations are now open for the 2010 A4U Awards. This means it’s time for the great and the good in AM to nominate their favourite Publisher, Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2010, Account Manager at a Network, Affiliate Manager, and Affiliate Network.

Awards are funny things and are often the focus of some heated debate. Take the big bingo portals for instance. Every year they compete to offer bingo merchants an award for best site or newcomer. The merchants lap this up and encourage their users to vote and/or plaster links back to the portals on their site and newsletter with absolutely no regard for their other affiliates. Do I want to send my users to a site that has “Go to XYZBingo and vote for us” on it?

No I don’t! It’s understandable why it’s done, although imo it’s the bingo portal getting the most benefit with extra traffic and backlinks – but I guess that’s my cynicism coming through there. It’s a tough situation to work round with the only solutions being that bingo sites don’t add links or every affiliate runs an award set up each year and everyone gets treated a bit more fairly.

Staying with gaming, last week was the IGB Affiliate Awards. Loquax was nominated as best bingo affiliate, but had little chance of winning (or even getting to the final shortlist), but we were in there somewhere. The good news was that the awards were streamed live, which was an interesting experience.

The presenters weren’t exactly Ricky Gervais at The Golden Globes (or even Jason Manford at A4UAwards 2009), more Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood at The Brits after a few drinks. Hopefully they came across better ‘live’. Still the dance group interlude was good and perhaps streaming is something A4U can look into for 2010?

One more point about IGB! I guess it’s not good form to question winners, but for the life of me I cannot understand how Ladbrokes took the bingo affiliate awards. There must be a The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe type door on their affiliate system that takes people through to Narnia that I’m missing as what I see isn’t that impressive on numerous levels. Still, well done to all winners there – opinion and debate are always a close second aren’t they?

So awards and controversy go hand in hand, and that takes us back to this year’s A4U Awards. Who will win? Who won’t win? And how much blog mileage can we get out of questioning the judging, the voting, the vote for mes and the who I voted fors! To get the ball rolling head on over to the 2010 A4U Awards and make your nominations.

The 4th Annual a4uAwards will be held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, Mayfair on the 9th June 2010.

Nominate Now for the 2010 A4UAwards

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