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Gannett’s PointRoll announced today it has joined the Yahoo Smart Ads program to help marketers focus on creating rich media ads and improve campaign performance.  As a member of Yahoo’s Smart Ads program, PointRoll will use Yahoo’s reach and targeting capabilities to provide more customized, relevant and scalable rich media campaigns. PointRoll will also use its ShopLocal retail ad program to offer improved Smart Ads for retail advertisers.

eBay has announced "Quality Click Pricing" for the eBay Partner Network affiliate program. The company describes this as a new payout structure designed to further reward affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay, and who send "value buyers" to the company's sites.

Amazon.com is continuing with its policy to abandon its affiliates program in any state that even considers legislation that would force the online retailer to collect and pay sales tax.

Amazon.com has killed another affiliates program due to proposed legislation that would force the company to collect and pay sales tax in Rhode Island. The move comes less than a week after Amazon notified its affiliates in North Carolina it would be ending its program there due to similar proposed legislation.

It appears as though Amazon’s email to affiliates regarding North Carolina’s pending taxes was not a bluff. I just received a follow-up email from the company saying it has decided to shut down its affiliate program in the state, as of today.

Today [Google is] launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest…so if you visit an online sports store, you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a discount on running shoes during that store’s upcoming sale.

Amazon.com has announced it will allow customers to trade-in used videogames for credit on its site, a move that will challenge game retailer GameStop. The company has launched Amazon Video Games Trade-In in beta. "Our video game trade-in process is easy. Go to www.amazon.com/tradeingames and discover games that you want to trade among hundreds of titles," the Amazon Game Room's Blog states.

Today Google announced a new online course that will help interested parties prepare to get a Google Analytics certification. It costs $50 to take the test to get certified, but to me the more interesting part is the course itself.