A Marketing Mix

According to Ad Age, only a few brands, notably Google and Deloitte, have publicly stated that they intend to register generic top-level domains ("gTLDs") during ICANN's enrollment period.

Many brands have remained mum, perhaps not wanting to tip their hand with the enrollment period remains open.  Several highly visible brands, such as
Facebook and Pepsi, have opted not to register brand-related gTLDs that would
enable them to create .pepsi domains in place of .com or other top-level domain
tags.

Among those companies, Pepsi cited high costs (approximately
$185K to register a gTLD) and the likelihood that users' web browsing habits
will take years to change.

What remains to be seen is whether the highly contentious gTLD program will, in the end, vindicate ICANN's stance in opposition to marketers, or founder as companies and others decide they can live withour .your name here.

But times really have changed. Attention on the end user is rising; the intermediary structure is declining. And publishers should be rethinking their branding strategies, at the core of which are imprints, as they address the emerging marketplace realities.

And as they contemplate how to make money from the digital readers of the future they should take heart. A generation that’s willing to pay for ringtones can probably be persuaded to buy anything.

Even news …

Shitter is a startup that turns tweets into sheets of toilet paper. The company’s slogan? “Social Media has never been so disposable.” How appropriately inappropriate.

Apple's decision to reject an e-book by Seth Godin because it contains hyperlinks to books in the Amazon store is just another example of how the oligopoly that controls the market for e-books is turning the landscape of reading into a walled garden.
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Just as a few massive chain stores eventually came to dominate the traditional printed book market in North America, the e-book marketplace is a kind of oligopoly involving a few major players — primarily Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. And while bookstore owners of all kinds are free to decide which books they wish to put on their shelves, these new giants have far more control over whose e-books see the light of day because they also own the major e-reading platforms, and they are making decisions based not on what they think consumers want to read but on their own competitive interests. That is turning the e-book landscape into even more of a walled garden.

Author and digital-marketing maven Seth Godin highlighted this issue in a recent blog post, in which he described how his new book was turned down by Apple because it contained hyperlinks to books sold by Amazon (with whom Godin has a partnership). According to a letter that the author says he received from the company, the new title — Stop Stealing Dreams, a book about the transformation that Godin believes needs to happen in public education — was rejected by Apple due to what the letter described as “multiple links to [the] Amazon store.” Godin notes that the book had links to related works, including Too Big to Know from David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

And you thought Pinterest was only useful for lonely pastry fantasy. This anonymous conman talked to the Daily Dot, and boy does he have an easy job: fooling Pinterest's lonely materialists into clicking Amazon spam links.

Horrible -- and this leads only to tighter TOS policies for everyone.