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I don't know about you but I think I want a refund on this weekend. It was supposed to be good ... in fact I'm sure I got a guarantee that it would even be better than just plain good ... but somewhere, somehow my weekend just plain sucked. So I want a refund dammit!

Instead of going jet skiing I ended up spending almost all of Sunday indoors, at home, doing something very tedious and very boring despite the fact that the weather was wonderful, the wind was from the right direction and the bay was really calm.

Then late on Sunday our host had a major air conditioning failure in their data centre and our server ... and a whole lot of others too ... went down for a couple of hours. At least we had nothing critical running at that time and if there is ever a good time for servers to go down then that time period was it.

It's a good time in Australia because most people aren't sitting in front of their computers late on a summer Sunday afternoon and it's very late at night in the United States too.

Trouble didn't strike the servers belonging to Deecash at such a convenient time though. Earlier today their servers went down just as they were into a huge promo day. Lots of affiliates had spent lots of money buying great gallery spots and others had turned a lot of traffic towards Deecash too. When you invest that amount of money and effort into getting sales it really does suck when the sponsor's sites go down.

So maybe I'm not the only one who is going to want a refund on this weekend - Deecash might want one too. Now I wonder who actually gives refunds like that?

Alternative Payment Options
One thing I did get to do over the weekend was to catch up on some of my reading and some figures that were released by Hitwise during last week caught my attention. Hitwise was looking at the growing popularity of alternative online payment options and they noted that, for the week ending December 8, traffic to PayPal was down 1 percent on the same period last year and traffic to Google Checkout was done 34 percent on the same period.

Despite discounts and promotions to encourage usage it seems that Google Checkout is not yet the huge success that Google were hoping for. I know it's easy to forget but Google actually has more failures than successes when it tries to step out of its search role so we shouldn't be surprised that Google Checkout isn't a raging success.

While traditional payment methods didn't do so well during that week Bill Me Later - basically a site that offers people a short-term line of credit - was up a whopping 271 percent during the same period. There are some very big names using Bill Me Later and they include Walmart and Overstock.

So if mainstream sees a need to use alternative payment options why aren't we trying alternatives too? For that matter why aren't our billing companies, offering alternatives?

Sometimes I think that the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that once pervaded this industry and gone and now we're nothing but a bunch of old grandmas who are stuck fast in the past.

The Same Old Same Old
The thought that this industry is now full of people who are too scared of their own shadow was brought home to me again this morning. Just lately I've been wandering through a few different sponsors' sites for two different clients and I can't get over how the tours all look exactly the same these days.

Why are we so stuck on site designs that everyone uses? Why can't we see something new, something different, something exciting that will catch the surfers' attention and make them want to look further because the tour looks so different? Why must every sponsor deliver the same tour design that everyone else uses?

All the tours that I've looked at have been so similar that I knew exactly what I would find below the first fold and I knew exactly what I would find at the foot of ever page too. It's old, it's boring and unless sponsors are going to get themselves out of that rut they're in we're going to see signups slip away because the surfers won't believe that they'll see anything new if they pay money to join a site.

Where has the innovation gone in this industry? Where's the marketing leadership that we once had? What a boring bunch of hold has-beens we're turning into ... and we wonder why we aren't making as much money as we once did.