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Today's Wired News story on those who abuse affiliate marketing programs inspired quite a few in the affiliate marketing community to write in.
Some thought I painted with too broad a brush and did not understand how legitimate companies operated.
A couple people who either run or used to run affiliate programs thought the story was dead on.
I also got an interesting email from Mark O'Connor, the CEO of Hearsay.com, which runs a collection of blogs that collect selected news articles on range of subjects (click a topic on the left menu to see an example or two).
His company isn't thrilled with affiliate marketing.
O'Connor wrote (excerpt quoted with his permission):
We've been experimenting with affiliate programs at Hearsay for about 3-4 months, and it's not yielding much for us at this point. So if our experience is an indicator, it's more likely you'll see sites drop the affiliate marketers, rather than the other way around. From an advertiser's perspective, it's the holy grail. They get to have their ads served up to a targeted audience for free, in my case intellectual property attorneys. We get nothing unless one of our visitors chooses to visit their site (through our link to it), and purchases something. We get nothing for future revenue generated from that client, or for clients that use our site to identify products or services to purchase - but contact the company directly.Instead of the advertiser "trusting" the publisher in terms of demographics, the publisher now needs to trust the advertiser. The advertiser or its agregator reports the statistics. And Google is no different. They don't even share the details of their relationship with the advertisers that are served up on our sites. All I get to see is roll-up statistics. So the bottom line appears to be that it's good times for advertisers and advertising aggregators, and bad times for "little-guy" publishers. What we need is a publishers' cooperative for advertising so we can yield the market power of Google or Yahoo. You'll always have the scammers beating the systems that you describe in your piece. My fear is that the biggest scammers today are the biggest names in the business.
Posted by Ryan Singel at February 10, 2005 03:32 PM
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Ryan Singel is citing a story by Wired News writer Kim Zettner on RFID cards being used by a school district in California to track children. Throughout the article Zettner creates the impression that there is a massive protest by parents over the school district's program to use RFID cards. Yet she only cites a single parent in the story. Ryan provides a link to the letter that was written to the Brittan school board to complain, yet no where in the text is information on how many parents are concerned over these developments. Another article indicates that two parents contacted the ACLU with their complaints.
What is obvious is that the letter was put together by the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) according to a press release being circulated by the groups. Without a sense of how many parents are outraged, I have to assume that this is a publicity event by several privacy groups who are using a couple of parents in the process. For instance, how many parents are glad that the school can keep better track of their children? Isn't this a key responsibility of schools?
Zettner has left critical facts out of this story which comes across very one-sided, even from the very beginning with the title "School RFID Plan Gets an F." One expects more than a one-sided article, or should I say a press release masquerading as journalism, from a reporter for a national publication.
Posted by: Dennis Bailey at February 12, 2005 08:38 PM