"I work hard on my site," says one affiliate.
"I have made a site that people like to visit, I compete
fairly in the search engines. I don't steal, or lie or cheat
to get visitors or customers. When a person clicks on one of
my links, it is fair and square.
I work hard on my site... The money I make goes to my family
so we can have a better life.
Then one day I find out that someone has decided to steal
from me. Instead of using what they know to do good, they use
it for EVIL. They use it to steal from others. And, then they
LIE about it, time and time again.
Instead of making their own site that people would like to
visit, they use my hard work to make money for themselves. They
decided to use their knowledge of programming to steal from me."
[Source: Vicki Hadfield]
And (this is me talking again) you, the networks, have been
letting them do it.
This is not what we signed up for. That is not what
you told us would happen!
CJ says: When a visitor to a publisher's Web site makes an
actual purchase online or fills out a form, that transaction
is tracked and recorded by Commission Junction.
From Performics: Join our affiliate program and earn cash
by promoting our brand and products on your site. Every time
you direct a consumer from your site to ours, you earn money
when that consumer makes a purchase.
(Unless there's a parasite in the neighbourhood ...)
BeFree: ... an affiliate partner promotes products and services
on its website for a commission. ....
Linkshare says; If you have a website, engage in email marketing,
or use browser extensions, you can become an affiliate. Linkshare
says: Affiliates earn commissions from merchants in exchange
for the traffic they drive, or the leads or sales the Merchant
makes.
Woohoo! Sounds great, doesn't it?
But none of the networks tell the folks with websites or email
lists that the browser extension crowd and other assorted critters
will intercept an unknown percentage of their traffic and pocket
the commissions that should have accrued to the website or email
list. OR, if they say it, I couldn't find it.
Truth in advertising? NOT!
Regular affiliates have no easy way to know how much they're
losing; they only know that it's happening. Some affiliates
set up scripts on their sites to count the visitors who are infected
with various undesirables. While results varied, a couple of
the testers concluded that as much as one-fifth one fifth!
-- of their traffic was infected with software capable of diverting
their visitors or stealing their commissions directly.
Others are more qualified than I to discuss the technicalities
of how these things work. Hey, they're Windows programs and I'm
a Mac user. But a point I want to make is that you don't always
need to analyze every last detail to judge whether something
is acceptable. In fact, too much focus on technical details can
cloud the most important issues. In this discussion what matters
most is not how it's done, but the harm that's done.
Imagine a travelling salesman who works hard at doing
what travelling salesmen do. He finds and visits potential clients,
presents his products well, and generates new sales for his company.
Now, suppose someone else contrived to interrupt some of his
sales calls just at the point where the customer was ready to
order, so she could take over and close the sale. Or,
imagine that someone got access to the paperwork for the salesman's
customers, and changed a line in some orders so he would
get the commission instead of the fellow who did the work. Is
that a good thing? (no)
I talked to some people who work in offline sales, to ask
how such situations might be handled in their company. What would
happen to the person who did it? "They'd lose their license,"
said one. "We'd fire them," said another.
"I'll ask my brother," said one man. His brother
brokers some Very Big Deals in the sports marketing business.
Here's his perspective:
This person, if it was PROVED to be true as outlined, would
be fired. Their last amount of pay period would be deducted from
their salary and paid to the damaged parties, and if the amounts
were greater than that, the person would be held criminally responsible.
(They would be criminally responsible anyway, but, well, there's
such a thing as threshold tolerance.)
This type of behavior is criminal and has no place in a company
like mine. If others feel the person should be brought to therapy,
etc., fine, then do it on someone else's payroll. And may word
get around that any other "criminals" within the company
will be handled in the same way. This is the SAME THING AS ENRON,
just on another level. ....
"And at that level of deceit," the brother continued,
"trust is endangered... you have to leave. Immediately.
We'll pack your belongings... come back Friday and pick up your
stuff. You can take your coat, umbrella, car keys, but not a
single piece of paper. Leave everything else... if it's yours,
it'll be in the box on Friday. We don't trust you for another
minute in this building. Security, please escort this person
out. Immediately." [Jack Vincent, Focus
Sports]
That's how commission theft is viewed in the brick-and-mortar
world. Everyone I talked to in offline sales had a similar reaction.
Such behaviour is despised, disparaged, and even prosecuted.
So, I ask the affiliate networks, why have YOUR standards
been different? Why have you taken so long to start to begin
to think about how to respond to what is, in essence, the same
thing that would trigger instant dismissal in an ethical brick
and mortar company?
Look around, and you'll see a crisis of trust. You
are supposed to be our partners, yet you collaborate with, even
celebrate those who steal from us. Y'know, CJ, the accolades
you hand out to the link hijacker Ebates are a kick in the teeth
to affiliates everywhere who have been promoting the same merchants
in good faith, only to have their links over-written, their commissions
stolen.
You say, "They're not doing anything illegal." (I'm
not sure that's correct, but in any case I would suggest that
merely being "not illegal" is a shaky ethical base.)
You say, "It's not up to us to dictate who merchants should
partner with." I say, "Does that make it right for
you to break faith with the rest of us?" You have also said,
by the slowness of your actions, that you felt little responsibility
for warning merchants or affiliates that parasitic link placement
just might be causing problems. Affiliates everywhere feel betrayed
by your disregard for the simple ethic of being honest with those
who partner with you. I suspect a few merchants do, too.
You, the networks, are alienating a lot of talent. As
more affiliates become aware that their commissions are being
stolen, and realize how slow you have been to even talk about
it, let alone DO something, they're actively hunting for independent
merchants to promote. You've been doing your merchants few favours,
because this situation is driving capable affiliates into the
arms of the competition. And of course, you lose your piece of
the action when that happens, too.
I have no idea how big the issue of talent loss is. I have
no way to know what portion of your business you're squandering
this way. But the effect IS real. And it WILL grow ... unless
you take action to make SURE that commissions on sales to OUR
traffic end up in OUR pockets, not that of some last-minute interloper.
Here's an example. Mr. Crawford, Mr. Pullen, if you looked
up my CJ stats for September, you'd see they were up from last
year. Same with Performics. You might think the stats tell a
happy story, but they don't. Not really. For several months,
my crisis of trust has been leading me to work more with merchants
outside the networks. In September, my commissions from one merchant
added up to as much as my entire Commission Junction check. And
there were others ...
You're alienating a lot of talent. You're experiencing a loss
that you don't even see. You might think my stats look fine,
but ponder the fact that if I had not felt betrayed, I'd have
had little reason to look for merchants outside your system,
and the sales you see from me could have been much higher. That's
a loss your accountants won't see, but it's very real. Multiply
that by enough people, and you'll kiss a lot of money goodbye.
Maybe I should rephrase that -- you won't be kissing it goodbye,
because you won't see it in the first place. Your competition
will.
Here's something to think about: in numerous articles,
I've seen parasites defend themselves by saying, "The user
chose to have our software on their system. Therefore what we
do is okay." I don't buy that line of thought, and I observe
that the parasites themselves don't really believe in user choice
anyway. They don't have enough regard for their own rhetoric
to make their software easy to uninstall. Some of these applications
are hard to remove even for highly experienced users. If these
companies truly believed in user choice, their software would
be equally easy to uninstall -- completely -- as it was to install.
One click. But do they do that?
User choice should be user choice, not a life sentence!
My PC-using friends tell me that a PC infested with
parasites is less reliable and more crash-prone. System performance
suffers. If someone did something to my car that had comparable
effects, it would be called vandalism.
Merchants and networks alike should consider the potential
for harm to their hard-earned brand if they associate with this.
I have read more than one frustrated person post on a message
board that the only way they could get rid of the popups that
plagued them was to completely reformat their hard drive. What
do you think their opinion would be if they realize that this
or that merchant supports the software that caused such grief?
The brand-damaging potential should be treated at least as seriously
as email spam. Certainly the harm it causes is just as real from
the user's perspective.
Here's another thought: User frustration with excessive
popups is causing the use of popup-blocking software to spread.
Earthlink even offers a popup blocker as part of its sales pitch.
Many users don't know that the popups they dislike come from
programs hiding in their system. And even if they do know that,
it's often easier to just install a program to block them, rather
than clean them out. The trouble here is that such programs often
block everything they identify as ads, and this takes out a lot
more than just popups. This harms a lot of sites that depend
on responsible advertising to help pay their bills. Banners or
text links simply disappear when one of these programs is running...
Including links to all the network merchants.
Ad blocking software is outside the scope of today's discussion,
but I invite you to ponder how much sense it does NOT make, to
support things which feed the frustrations causing these programs
to proliferate. Everyone loses that way.
Sometimes people talk about "shopping bars"
as tools for customer retention. Sounds good -- IF you don't
think about it very deeply.
The problem with that theory is that if a visitor is on my
site, or has clicked through to my merchant, for that space of
time they are MY customer, not yours. The fact that they might
have had some previous relationship with you, to get your toolbar,
is irrelevant if the shopper is on MY site.
I'll bet lots of you sometimes shop at Walmart, and sometimes
shop at Sears. Whose customer are you? If you have entered the
Sears store you are a Sears customer, and Walmart must not interfere
with that. And vice versa if you have entered the Walmart store.
If someone is on my site, or has clicked through to one of
my merchants, no third party should be allowed to interfere or
prevent MY sales process from unfolding naturally. "Ah,"
one of you might say. "I have a coupon that would give the
customer a better deal." I say "Fine, feature it on
your site, but DON'T intrude on mine." I would point out
that if someone interrupts my sales process to offer, say, a
ten-dollar coupon, that will reduce the merchant's profit by
ten dollars. Which one of us is doing better for the merchant?
Affiliates everywhere are hoping that you, the networks,
will emerge from these discussions with clear and unambiguous
policies that will honour the contract we have with you -- to
pay us commissions on business that WE generate for our merchants.
We want a clear, unambiguous statement that you, or the merchants
who use your services, will not reward organizations known to
be intercepting commissions, however clever their schemes may
be.
We want you to protect our commissions from being stolen
by interlopers who poach other people's traffic. We want
you to stop rewarding organizations that violate our copyrights
and use our content to cause direct and deliberate harm to our
businesses. We want you to use your communications infrastructures
to notify merchants when an organization has been proved to be
stealing traffic. We can expect to see more stealth systems trying
to pass as legitimate affiliates, so we need to stand on guard
together.
We need you to stand on guard, and enforce your policies when
they are violated. Without enforcement, there are no standards.
The bottom line is this (and I credit Ralph
Wilson for these words):
The advertising or affiliate link that brings the shopper
to the merchant's site should be credited with the sale. No usurping
software should be allowed to subvert this process and divert
affiliate commissions to those who did not earn them by initiating
traffic to the site.
We want you to commit to setting and enforcing ethical standards,
so that we can continue to grow together. Pay-for-performance
marketing can be a great system when everyone involved is behaving
ethically.
Let's make it work!
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