I was just reading a post from Daniel M. Clark (Affiliate Marketing: Just Like Porn, Apparently) about how TubeMogul has split out their multi-site video submission service as OneLoad.com.
But that’s not the story. Rather, Daniel was pointing out how OneLoad was lumping affiliate marketing with a list of other things they consider to be unsavory when signing up for the service…
NOTE: By clicking “Sign Up”, you agree to our Terms of Service and verify that you will not upload any multi-level marketing, affiliate marketing, network marketing, home-based business, cash gifting, phishing, pornographic or copyrighted third-party content. Any users uploading videos that a reasonable person would consider to be a scam will be banned.
Daniel went on to remark, “Anyone who doesn’t think affiliate marketing has an image problem has their head in the sand.”
Yes, the dark cloud over affiliate marketing is a narrative for some, but it’s not the dominant narrative. Nor should it be, as the cheats and dirtbags are not representative of the majority of the industry.
There are so many positive stories about affiliate marketing enabling people to leave bad jobs, get off unemployment, work from home with their children, and more – all as legitimate affiliate marketers.
That’s the problem with broad brushes. They miss the details. It’s similar to looking at a company that distributes the same exact content to a bunch of different places and calling them spam enablers.
Anyhow, I’d say it’s the duty of any affiliate marketer on the good side of the industry to report any bad actors to their respective merchants and networks.
We have to clean house internally if we’re going to fix the jaundiced view some have of affiliate marketing.
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Any network that cares about their advertisers would want to shutter those affiliates right away.
With regards to reporting fraudulent affiliate marketers to the affiliate networks, is it within the interest of the networks to keep folks of this ilk running or to shut them down as soon as possible?
I am happy to see that action is taken against such spammers & scammers. I have read few blogs where the bloggers have experienced a different audience at Affiliate Summit West 2012. I guess the scene will be completely different in next 2 years…. for good.
Absolutely, that’s why I was encouraging people to report those who promote in shady ways.
It’s not the offers that are the culprit but the means they use to market them. Promoting “sexual enhancement” products on a health blog is one thing, but Spamming emails with the same product from a half-billion email list is where this started.
I guess if we had billions of spam emailed for Health Care, we as Affiliates would get the same wrap for this too.
The biggest problem I believe is with malware. Familiar with the IT sector, I found the worst offenders tarnishing the industry with browser hijacking and pop-up ads without a means to opt-out.
We must do that job of marketing the industry – I think it’s a duel project of highlighting the good and drumming out the bad.
There are bad eggs in every industry, and we have our fair share. It’s tragic that to some, they represent the entire industry. I have to wonder: we do such a great job, collectively, of marketing goods and services for merchants and service providers… can we not do a great job – collectively – of marketing our industry?
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