If you want to read more on the sessions that happened at nextMEDIA, check out BrandingDavid.com, where there is a full index of the posts surrounding the event.

Marina Mann is an independent digital Marketing consultant specializing in e-Commerce and building online businesses. Marina has 11 years experience producing and monetizing interactive, high-tech customer experiences for entertainment, retail and telco brands. In 2007, Marina led Virgin Mobile Canada's Web marketing, strategy & operations and launched Virgin's content (VAS) portal.

The Internet is the world's largest marketplace, and a growing part of that is e-commerce. Affiliate marketing is a part of the e-commerce ecosystem.

The word of mouth economy is strong, and can push affiliate products quite easily. You can now reach thousands of people using Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and more.

Display advertising by itself is bad for conversion but good for branding while proper affiliate marketing integrations are stronger for conversions and result in a money making type of traffic.

"Affiliate marketing is like buying a T.V. ad, and only paying for it if it works" - Marina Mann

The presentation of course focused in on one affiliate model, and made it seem like publishers don't really get a good deal as they work hard to drive traffic for next to no money compared to the products that they are working to make sure are sold.

Publishers should focus on finding networks that can monetize their traffic sources. eBay can monetize any traffic from around the world, which is one advantage over companies that can only monetize any one countries traffic.

WestJet grew to 850 affiliates in their first year, and generated over $20 million in sales and used Commission Junction for their programs. But they almost closed the program because they didn't understand affiliate marketing, "if they aren't travel agents, what are they?"

Only the top twenty percent make substantial income as an affiliate sales expert, but in an economic downturn, as we are experiencing today, Affiliate Marketing will thrive as it will offer a lower-cost way of finding customers.

For a full index of all the posts related to nextMEDIA, check out BrandingDavid.com where I will be updating everyone on various sessions.

Another panel session, the second one before lunch on the first day, including an eclectic group of people. Trevor Doerksen from MoboVivo, David Purdy from Rogers Cable Communications and Missy Suicide from Suicide Girls.

The microphone on Michael Barry wasn't working well, though I was able to hear him, he was rather quiet. He started with Missy, and asked her how she started.

Started in 2001, with the simple idea of bringing people together to have people thrive. They created a subscription model by adding community features and working hard on branding over the last few years.

"What better than hot, beautiful people to bring people together" - Missy Suicide

The next one up in questioning was Trevor, who had to fend off the fact that video portals aren't a valuable offering online, and actually leech off others.

They thought of themselves an enabler for content producers to get their video online, but traditional media wasn't interested, and so they built out their portal by getting whatever content they could license.

They purchased premium content and turn it around to be a two or three dollar per episode sale system, and are working on the marketing aspect of the shows, which is the difficult part.

"Women are actually willing to pay for things, and us men are morally corrupt or something..." - Trevor Doerksen

David Purdy was next to answer some questions on Rogers Canada, a television and media company.

"If you call yourself just a TV guy, you'll be gone at some point in the future" - David Purdy.

Rogers is realizing that customers want to watch what they want, when they want, and where they want, and they are trying to get projects approved quickly to do that. It is difficult sometimes but they have to innovate.

He compared Rogers to Bell quite constantly, and continued to say that Bell was smart in getting out there early with online offerings and PVR products for television, but have made some mistakes in how they run and organize it.

What will happen to pay-per-view in the future? Well, David Purdy thinks that only the Adult industry and multi-cultural content will do well, and most people will move to the on-demand services.