Top Affiliate Challenge Official Blog The Web’s First Real-Time Affiliate Marketing Reality Show

If you haven’ already noticed, auditions are now closed for Top Affiliate Challenge Season 1.  While much of the work for our prospective contestants is complete, behind the scenes there is still much going on.

Season 2:

While you won’t hear much out of us at this point, there will be a season 2 of Top Affiliate Challenge.  We are planning on a 4-month video audition period which means auditions for season 2 will be accepted sometime in March 2009.  It’s a long way off, but we want to let everyone know that they should save their audition videos or dream up possibilities for new ones for next season.

As producers we have learned a great deal from this experience and will be tuning our processes and procedures for next season.

Scoring Updates:

We have completed the introduction of a new scoring system that calculates scores more quickly than the old one did.  On each page load of the website, 10 more scores are calculated.  With about 150 videos in the system, that means a complete scoring recalculation every 15 page loads, or about 8 times an hour.

As we approach the voting deadline (June 14th at midnight) we will move toward real-time scoring updates.  This will beat the heck out of our server, but we know its important to the potential contestants to know exactly where they stand instantly.  Additionally, super votes will be added in real time as well on the final day.

Final Audition Videos Processing:

We are also processing the final audition videos that were submitted before the deadline.  There were about 13 new auditions submitted, so expect to see those coming online today.  There were some pretty good videos in that bunch, so expect some tough competition going into the final days (and maybe the first 9 base score ever given?!?!)

On a final note to everyone who auditioned for the show, I want to personally say thank you.  You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to take a video that a real person - someone I know in many cases - has poured their heart and time into and assign it a simple number.  What looked so easy on paper was actually very difficult in practice.

We are so happy that such a culturally and geographically diverse group of people auditioned for the show.  The internet is truly a global community, and we wanted TAC to reflect that.

Final Push for Votes:

Now tat auditions are over, the final push for votes and super votes has begun.  Already we have seen a pretty decent shake up in the top 10, and I expect to see a few others push their way into it based on the voting trends we see here.

If you can’t make it into the top 10 try to stay in the top 25% at least.  We are not looking forward to it, but we will be picking two of our contestants from that pool.  Just a hint for the TAC junkies out there - you might want to start writing a 200 word “pitch” as to why we should pick you for the show.  Then you will be ready when we ask for it!