
Are affiliate links dirty? - nate
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2010/03/are-affiliate-links-dirty.html
======
BrandonM
Do people really not give themselves any credit for having some kind of
morality? This author seems to be questioning whether _the author himself_
would be doing something wrong by including affiliate links. If you can't
include affiliate links and still write a fair review, then don't. I know
myself well enough to say that I would be happy to give a fair representation
and still allow myself the chance to receive some payment for the work I've
done.

It's not impossible to write a neutral or negative review for an item and
still include an affiliate link -- the only slant I could see happening is
trying to include _something_ positive, but I would argue that we should be
doing that anyways when we are criticizing something. If you are an honest
reviewer, you may be concerned about people not clicking affiliate links for
badly-rated items. The solution is to try to find something similar that you
can honestly give a positive review for, then link to that positive review
from the negative review. Your readers will appreciate you for your honesty
and will be more likely to trust your positive reviews if you follow a policy
like this.

The problem becomes a bit harder as a person reading someone's reviews. You
can usually identify affiliate links pretty easily just by scanning the URL.
If the author is using an affiliate link, it is up to the reader to determine
how much faith they have in that author. If they do not believe in the
author's integrity, then why are they reading that author's reviews in the
first place? After all, affiliate links aren't the only way to skew a
dishonest author's integrity (think: free goodies, free trips to "review"
expensive items, etc.).

~~~
nate
This brings up an interesting point though from another book I read "Sway"
from Ori Brafman. There's a chapter called Compensation and Cocaine, and they
talk about some research done on the brain when money is involved. And
basically, a part of your brain turns on when money is involved. So even if
you are trying to do something altruistic, as soon as money was involved
people immediately started acting differently and part of their brain took
over the process. It was like you have "two different engines" and they can't
work at the same time, even if you as above think you can. I'm not exactly
arguing against any of your points, just that this 2 brain thing when money is
involved is super interesting, and maybe adds bias even for the most awesome
of people that just shouldn't be there.

~~~
BrandonM
That's certainly an interesting and relevant point. I would like to shift
gears for a second and come back to why I don't think it should be
particularly relevant here.

First of all, I think we focus way too often on the "average" or "median"
behavior when trying to define how humans behave. In a lot of cases
(optimizing a website or arranging a retail outlet), this makes perfect sense.
In many areas, this is misapplied.

Imagine that a researcher did a study on dunking a basketball. They are very
careful to take an appropriately-representative sample of a country's
population, and they find that something like 0.5% (totally made up) of the
people can dunk on a standard 10-foot basket. They find that lowering the
basket to 9 feet allows about 5-10% to be able to dunk, and they provide
arguments for why this 5-10% figure is an ideal number for maximal excitement
of a basketball game. We can clearly see that this is a bad reason to use for
lowering an NBA hoop to 9 feet. NBA players are extraordinary, and appealing
to the average is silly.

In the same way, I think this could be regarded as a similar case. Clearly
only a small percentage of the population is capable of writing good reviews.
It is automatically narrowed to people who are capable of writing not only
clearly, but also in a way that makes a somewhat dull topic more interesting.
We should be able to further narrow "good reviewers" to that group of
reviewers who are always honest in their review, those (perhaps rare) people
whose reviews are _not_ swayed by potential monetary gain. And there are
certainly people like this.

Perhaps what we really need is a way to differentiate the best across all
kinds of categories, something like an NBA of professionals. Currently we rely
on various magazines and news sources to select the best reviewers, but this
narrows the field too much and too arbitrarily, while irrelevant things like
seniority and past results affect judgment of a person's abilities. Perhaps
it's time for the business/information world to take something from the sports
world.

------
fnid2
I prefer affiliate links to ads if they are done right. If it is just a shill
for the product i'm leery, but if there is some value add or a quality review,
they're ok.

My question is, why do these people with so much money already waste their
time on a a 40 cent commission for a book?

It'd be better for them to avoid the suspicion. Take the ulterior motive out
of the equation. Trust is worth a lot.

~~~
nate
Yep, that's a great question I kind of wanted to bring up in the post as well,
but it was getting long.

Because it calls into question things about how much money Tim makes, which is
sort of none of my business, but since he writes a book and blog about how you
can be basically make more money more efficiently, it sort of becomes
interesting to me.

Does he need the supplementary income from Amazon because he doesn't make
enough from his books + lecturing + investing?

How much money is he making with this kind of thing?

And maybe it was sort of unintentional to post an affiliate link and his
Wordpress installation just auto links those somehow?

~~~
Alex3917
My best guess is that Tim makes 35,000 dollars per speech, and a few hundred
bucks per year from referral fees. The reason Tim blogs is to build his
permission asset and then monetize it speaking, it's not like he's writing the
posts because he wants an extra couple bucks on Amazon.

~~~
fnid2
That's exactly my point. It seems like his time would be more productive spent
somewhere else besides going to amazon, searching for the book, getting his
affiliate code in t.... on and on

------
leviathant
With my own sites, this is what I ended up doing: I've typically linked to
Amazon and eBay regardless, from time to time (I run news sites about NIN and
Tool). When I finally decided to sign up for affiliate links, I started
getting money when I linked to Amazon and eBay. The prices weren't any higher
for my readers - at worst, Amazon or eBay get a little less of a profit, but
in exchange, get traffic from my site.

I haven't changed the main content of my site - the news portion - and if an
album comes out, I'll post pre-orders for Amazon, Best Buy, and anywhere else
that takes pre-orders, and I continue to emphasize the cheapest one, even if
it's not Amazon.

With eBay, the affiliate program got me interested in utilizing their API,
with which I built some smart filters and created a page on my site where you
can buy secondhand records and posters (which aren't available new) from a
list that I maintain, keeping out bogus vendors and counterfeits. I built
something that I as a reader would actually use.

If you allow your affiliate links to dramatically change how you post, that's
kinda crappy. But I think I do an okay job of integrating affiliate links in
an appropriate fashion.

------
TravisLS
If someone finds out about a book through your site, then continues on to buy
that book, you should be rewarded for generating that traffic - that's why the
affiliate program exists in the first place.

I think you can get around any moral qualms by clearly pointing out any
affiliate links. If you're turning readers on to a good book, they'll be happy
to intentionally click your affiliate link.

------
sssparkkk
The problem IMO is that affiliate links in the hands of entrepreneurial types
will get ugly pretty fast. There's simply more money to be made when you're
not being objective about what you're recommending: just pitch the highest
paying affiliate link as the best option available.

And contrary to what you are proposing (mention it's a 'sponsored link')
you'll often see that people who place these affiliate links in their
articles/overview-sites are explicitly stating to be objective (or having the
compiled the best overview possible, etc). This of course because it increases
their conversions.

------
adammichaelc
I think the important point to consider here is where the incentives are.
People generally follow the incentives, and even if they don't there's the
perception that they do -- in a case of reviewing a site or a book this kills
credibility.

In the consumer-review industry, for example, I think we all can say that we
trust Consumer Reports, their incentive being to give the most accurate
information because they rely on a revenue stream from the consumer. If they
don't give accurate information, they won't be trusted and their customers
will stop paying.

On the other hand there's Top Ten Reviews, who perform a similar service as
Consumer Reports, but do reviews on software and other technology products.
Their business model is to include affiliate links for each of their products
- this gives them the incentive to find the highest-paying commissions and
best-converting landing pages. They have little incentive to give the best
information because of where their revenue comes from. I think that most savvy
people don't trust them. It's true that there will always be a "sucker" who
won't realize the conflict of interest and will buy a product - this fact
allows Top Ten Reviews and sites like them to be profitable. But they will
never gain the trust or stature of Consumer Reviews, because the savvy
visitors won't rely on the information they have, and savvy honest people
won't recommend the site to others.

I'm in class so I don't have time to edit this to make sure my arguments flow
without any logical inconsistencies, but you get the idea.

------
nfnaaron
I've never had a problem with affiliate links. I don't think they're dirty. I
can recognise a valuable review opposed to a worthless review, so whether
there are affiliate links in the review doesn't affect my reception of the
review.

It doesn't make any difference to me if a review is bad because it's a forced
shilling exercise or because it's an uninformed review, it's just bad and
easily ignored, usually by the first or second paragraph.

I click on so few links that if an occasional shill gets some change from my
purchase, I don't care, because I would have bought the item (or not) anyway,
and not based on a single review.

As for identifying affiliate links, I don't think it's necessary from a moral
perspective. I think the FTC is nosing around in the area of late, so it might
be a safe thing to do. I can't think of an unwieldy way to do it though.

If you want to make it obvious you'd put it in the link text, ">The Bible
(sponsored link)<". That kind of looks ugly, although if it became common
maybe I could get used to it.

A tool tip (title attribute) might be good enough, and less distracting when
merely reading the text.

------
minouye
To clarify, this article is focusing on affiliatizing product links in
editorial content--not affiliate links in general.

One overlooked point is the potential _costs_ of writing biased articles to
boost affiliate commissions. Anyone serious about maintaining and building
readership would avoid this at all costs. In the long-run, doing so would
ultimately be ROI negative (unless the author's sole goal is to create a thin
affiliate site).

As other commenters have mentioned, most savvy Internet user can see through
these ploys. The victims are the more unsophisticated that find review sites
through long-tail Google searches and not through blog subscriptions. Thin
affiliate sites are generally to blame, not the serious content producers.

------
lsc
as for "do affiliate links alter your writing" I can't really answer that for
you. For me, I think they might. (now, I think that I might actually point out
that I'm getting paid, and I might point out flaws in the service more than I
normally would. I'm good at selling to nerds, and to no one else.)

As for "do affiliate links make me look dirty" it depends on your writing
style and your audience. If, say, I wrote an article on kuro5hin.org and
included affiliate links, even with my usual self-deprecating tone, I'd be
castrated as a spammer. Hacker news has a fairly positive view of advertising,
so as long as your page had some real content and wasn't obviously made to
only push the links, you are probably okay.

(Now, I have slipped affiliate links on K5, but only to my book; It's my book,
so affiliate link or no, I'm expected to be biased.)

I've been thinking about this some, as I've been considering signing up for
the affiliate programs of my competitors; I mean, I do certainly recommend my
competitors to some of my potential customers, so why not get paid for it? The
worry there is that it could increase the feeling of prgmr.com being super
tiny, which I guess we are, so maybe I should embrace that?

