Double-Dipping the Affiliate Chip

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The issue of affiliate network employees acting as affiliates in their own time is not going away. I keep hearing from affiliates who are mad as hell about the whole situation.

If you are not familiar with this situation, where some former CJ employees were playing the affiliate game while collecting a CJ paycheck, it’s been covered ad infinitum by industry bloggers, including David Lewis, Vinny Lingham, Lisa Picarille, and Adam Viener.

As reported by David Lewis in late January, “The Rumour Mill has it that three top account managers left CJ this week to avoid enforcement of a policy forbidding them to have affiliate sites of their own.”

Since then, affiliates have been simmering privately and publicly about the issue. According to an article in Revenue Magazine, the three CJ employees to walk the plank were “Chad Darling, an account representative for many affiliates; Andy Powell, who didn’t work with publishers but was part of the search management team; and Don Batsford, a CJ employee, who joined the company when it acquired Be Free.”

Another section of Revenue Magazine, “thewebcrawler,” authored by an anonymous source, commented, “If I were an affiliate, I certainly wouldn’t want my account rep to see all my crucial data, never mind use it to build up their own program. But clearly, being an affiliate must be more lucrative than just talking with them all day, or each of these account managers wouldn’t have opted to leave.”

One CJ PPC Performer commented to me privately, “I would strongly recommend that the affiliate accounts of Chad Darling and the others be revoked–as they have only smeared the reputation of CJ without adding anything to the bottom line (i.e. their gain was the loss of CJ Performers.)”

Nary a public mention has been made by CJ on the issue and affiliates are wondering if there will be more outings or if the new policy prohibiting employees from being affiliates is more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” deal.