Affiliate Disclosure for review sites, fucking madness.

avatar33

avatar33

e-Hustler
Dec 5, 2009
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Calgary, AB
So I've been working with this network for a couple years, and they have been gradually tightening their affiliate disclosure rules... it started with just requiring affiliates to have a separate disclosure page that explains that we are paid for our "reviews"... then they wanted it a little more prominent, in the footer for example... but now they are forcing all affiliates to stick a long disclosure paragraph in RED right in the lead capture form above the Submit button. It's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is I did this and it dropped my conversion rates by fucking 35%.

Now I noticed that other networks have this offer and it seems that they are not as strict as this one I'm with. Their affiliates have the disclosure in the footer but not right in the lead capture form.

My question for you guys is: any of you got in legal trouble because of this? Is the footer disclosure still acceptable or does it need to be right in the customer's face when he lands on the site and right where your call to action is?
 


What about split testing it? For example, something along the lines of

"Please note, in order to keep this site running and free of ads, we do receive a commission if you sign up for X. However, all of our reviews are written totally independently, and we never ever ever skew a review based on that commission, we're happy to give bad reviews to those companies if they deserve it, and good reviews to companies that don't pay us a dime. Please help keep the site ad-free by using the link above!"
 
avatar33 said:
So I've been working with this network for a couple years, and they have been gradually tightening their affiliate disclosure rules... it started with just requiring affiliates to have a separate disclosure page that explains that we are paid for our "reviews"... then they wanted it a little more prominent, in the footer for example... but now they are forcing all affiliates to stick a long disclosure paragraph in RED right in the lead capture form above the Submit button. It's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is I did this and it dropped my conversion rates by fucking 35%.

Now I noticed that other networks have this offer and it seems that they are not as strict as this one I'm with. Their affiliates have the disclosure in the footer but not right in the lead capture form.

My question for you guys is: any of you got in legal trouble because of this? Is the footer disclosure still acceptable or does it need to be right in the customer's face when he lands on the site and right where your call to action is?
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well, this isn't the best place to discuss this since there are like umpteen affiliate network owners aka people who have installed cake.

kind of similar when we started having to put "advertorial" in the header of flogs, there are ways around everything.
 
shawnhag said:
well, this isn't the best place to discuss this since there are like umpteen affiliate network owners aka people who have installed cake.

kind of similar when we started having to put "advertorial" in the header of flogs, there are ways around everything.
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They are never going to catch you if you are careful with your cloak..... even if they have an incline what you are doing! :)
 
Have faced this and many affiliate programs ask to show it for specific visitors only. Ask them, maybe it turns out only for EU.
 
theemu said:
+1

I do thing the dark way and will make sure the affiliate manager comes to the site and sees everything clean but the visitors who take up the offer dont get anything of the sort
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And this is why every affiliate gets treated like a fucking criminal. You're cool high school "black hat" techniques are fucking all of us, fucking the industry as a whole.
 
lol@cloaking. It's so easy to bypass any cloaks... News flash, your $20 a week revenue isn't going to make them manually review anything.
 
Disclosure is only relevant if you're doing real volume, unless your network is a non-serious one with the time to check each affiliate individually. And if your network demands a big red disclosure in the worst place possible from all affiliates, switching networks is the smarter way.

And if you are doing real volume, you have the opportunity to actually discover that disclosures don't have to cause a big drop in conversion through testing the elements on the page.

What you must do first is find some very popular, legit sites in your demographic, and look at how they place their disclosures and other boring stuff that people don't want to read.

Then you test out a few placements/wordings of your disclosures, along with different 'call to action' that gets people excited enough to follow through with converting while ignoring boring disclosures. An exciting layout and appropriate imagery and wording gets people converting, whether disclosure or none.

People made big money without disclosure back in 2008, but since then disclosure has become the norm. That means a savvy affiliate is able to use this norm to their advantage - placing disclosure where people expect one to be, and thus ignore it.

All the time spent keeping cloaking scripts leak-proof and feeling like a bad-ass could be applied to figuring out how to get people "taking action" even in the face of a disclosure. Such a skill is truly valuable and will ensure you never go broke. And anybody can learn to do it - it's only about commitment to testing and tracking, not having innate high-level persuasion skills you have to be born with.
 
get rid of affiliate network and run your own product :)

you've been doing this for a couple years, take your most profitable review sites, make a product it and drive the focus of the LP to yours.
 
avatar33 said:
but now they are forcing all affiliates to stick a long disclosure paragraph in RED right in the lead capture form above the Submit button. It's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is I did this and it dropped my conversion rates by fucking 35%.
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If that only killed 35%, you must be doing a lot of things right.


cheshire said:
And this is why every affiliate gets treated like a fucking criminal. You're cool high school "black hat" techniques are fucking all of us, fucking the industry as a whole.
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Wow... cool out a little. Killing conversion rates by 35% is what will kill a campaign entirely. That's enough to make a ton of otherwise profitable things unprofitable.

Truthfully, the affiliate managers want plausible deniability. They have other people making stupid demands.

This might freak you out to no end, but different rules apply to different affiliates. If the merchant knows you convert well, and you have a good relationship with them, they will let you slide on a lot of things. That goes for every level of the relationship, from merchant to network to you.
 
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public. See if you can word it the right way as the dude with the benjamins suggested.
 
avatar33 said:
So I've been working with this network for a couple years, and they have been gradually tightening their affiliate disclosure rules... it started with just requiring affiliates to have a separate disclosure page that explains that we are paid for our "reviews"... then they wanted it a little more prominent, in the footer for example... but now they are forcing all affiliates to stick a long disclosure paragraph in RED right in the lead capture form above the Submit button. It's ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is I did this and it dropped my conversion rates by fucking 35%.

Now I noticed that other networks have this offer and it seems that they are not as strict as this one I'm with. Their affiliates have the disclosure in the footer but not right in the lead capture form.

My question for you guys is: any of you got in legal trouble because of this? Is the footer disclosure still acceptable or does it need to be right in the customer's face when he lands on the site and right where your call to action is?
Click to expand...

You could cloak the network &/or the merchant..... BUT

Are you willing to risk not getting paid if you get caught? My guess is if you go against their rules to generate users, and get caught most likely you're not going to get paid. Obviously were blatantly going against the rules.

Just something to consider.
 
Depends on your volume man.

If you are doing $xx,xxx a week do you want to risk not getting paid or having legal issues?

You need to balance out profitability vs compliance.
 
User9364 said:
Truthfully, the affiliate managers want plausible deniability. They have other people making stupid demands.

This might freak you out to no end, but different rules apply to different affiliates. If the merchant knows you convert well, and you have a good relationship with them, they will let you slide on a lot of things. That goes for every level of the relationship, from merchant to network to you.
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This is how I see it. Obviously they're only putting up those requirements so that when they get sued they can turn around and say "no look, I told the affiliate to follow the rules." They're not doing it to be assholes, and they're not gonna turn around and suspend an affiliate doing 5 figures a week just because he put the text in size 11 blue instead of size 12 red.

Or you could just drop that network.
 
smaxor said:
You could cloak the network &/or the merchant..... BUT

Are you willing to risk not getting paid if you get caught? My guess is if you go against their rules to generate users, and get caught most likely you're not going to get paid. Obviously were blatantly going against the rules.

Just something to consider.
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smaxor is going to hunt down OP and kill him. Not metaphorically, he's actually going to kill OP.

Cloaking. Not even once.

:ak:
 
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