Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all.
1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way
2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possible
3. Affiliate codes are not stripped or altered if they already exist
4. Copying links is unchanged
Before deploying this change, we tested it heavily to make sure we weren't doing anything that would be visible to the publisher or reader. The fact that it took 4 months for someone to really notice this is a testament to how unobtrusive it is.
Some people have commented that we should be sharing revenue back to the users. You are absolutely right. This is something we mentioned to Viglink at our very first meeting with them and something we will add when it's technically possible.
Admittedly, we should have announced this on our blog. This was definitely an oversight on our part. Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content.
From Posterous, we apologize. Going forward we will be sure to notify you of any changes we make to the site.
With regards to viglink: we really appreciate all your feedback and we're going to evaluate our use of the service going forward.
You tried to get away with it under the radar, succeeded for four months and someone found you out.
The fact that it took four months is a testament to how well you did what you could to hide it.
If you really want to be transparent you do these things in advance, and you make that a big part of your mission statement.
Four months is not an experiment, an experiment is something you do for a week or two, maybe a month.
Links should point to their destinations, any trickery under water to redirect links to something else than what the browser says it will do is well across the line of what's ok and what is definitely not. If you did that on your own content it would be bad, to do it on other peoples content is even worse.
Maybe YC should add a 'business ethics 101' as applied to the web with their investment package ?
Or do they encourage this sort of thing ?
Why not simply shut it off by default and allow your content producers to enable it, that way you take the sting out of it.
First off, let's turn down the rhetoric just a bit. You can like or dislike this feature without believing it goes "well across the line" of ethical behavior. We're talking about blog posts here, not scientific research or human life or politics or anything where a serious discussion of the ethics involved might be warranted.
Posterous isn't stealing money from anyone, and to the end user they aren't changing a single aspect of the user experience. They are altering the links of content creators slightly. Now, let's discuss that.
These links aren't being redirected to anywhere but the original destination. Adding an unobtrusive query parameter is absolutely not the same thing as pointing everyone to another website. I respect the opinion that it shouldn't be done, but I don't agree.
There are two arguments in play, the first is that altering links at all is fundamentally wrong. I can't refute that because it seems to be purely opinion driven. I can only say that I disagree, and that to me, things which have no detectable impact on the end user are not fundamentally wrong.
The other argument, and the one I find particularly silly, is this notion that Posterous shouldn't be privately profitting off other people's content. This is, in fact, how the entire economy of the ad driven web works. Users create content, site owners make money. See Google ads. What Posterous is doing is exactly the same thing, except it's better because I don't have to actually look at ads and I can still support the site.
Should Posterous have told people? Yeah. Should they offer an option to turn it off? Probably. But these are relatively minor complaints about an otherwise harmless feature.
It's not about whether or not it is harmless or not. It's simply a sneaky way of going about an otherwise perfectly ok business.
There would have been absolutely no harm in informing the users if they were not afraid that it would turn people away from posterous, but the way this now comes in to the open and the apology fall way short of what I'd come to expect of them. I'm not a user but I've done my bit to promote posterous and I feel that my trust that those people are in 'good hands' is misplaced.
Altering links is not fundamentally wrong, if you inform your user about it.
Profiting of other peoples content is fine too, if you are aboveboard about that being the deal.
Doing any of this without putting it loud and clear in your terms of service is definitely not ok.
And to make it seem like this was 'just an experiment' is stretching credulity to the breaking point and well beyond, that simply insults the intelligence of the users and the people here. The only reason it was four months is because that's how long it took for someone to figure it out.
Or they could have made an announcement. I have seen a lot of reviews and articles clearly mentioning that the link they are posting is an affiliate link and I don't find anything wrong with that. Because they are explicitly saying that it is an affiliate link and it is the choice of a visitor then.
There is nothing wrong with affiliate links, _as long as_ the visitor is aware of it.
I don't think the visitors are the people that matter, but the creators of the content, other than that I agree, if they mentioned it explicitly and not clouded in legalese ('we can modify your content', which most people would interpret to mean we can edit your content in case it is offensive or in case it violates the tos).
> Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content.
I'm sure users will be forgiving, but your credibility may be blown (re: transparency) by not announcing something like this. Why is it so trendy to be 'transparent'? Why claim to adhere to principles that you clearly didn't follow?
I kind of feel bad now because this really isn't that big of a deal... I think I just couldn't pass on the opportunity to take my general dislike for 'transparency' out on someone. Sorry, Posterous! :(
1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way
2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks...
3. Affiliate codes are not stripped...
4. Copying links is unchanged
and
5. All outbound clicks are recorded by an obscure 3rd
party server without my consent or knowledge.
You are routing me through a third party server in the sneakiest way possible. Who the hell cares if the affiliate codes are getting rewritten?
I wouldn't mind if you were changing the href attribute of the links so that hovering over a link would've showed the real destination. But, alas that would've not fly with way too many people. Google link pointing at api.viglink.com looks suspicious and intrusive. What makes you think that hiding this redirect behind some javascript hackery makes it any more acceptable?
Re: 4) Links are changed if you copy them. I went to the linked article, right-clicked the "Google" link and clicked "Copy URL". I went to gedit and pasted this:
An "oversight" for four months? On a critical part of your business that has a direct impact on the perception of the quality of the blogs you host? Are you trying to become the Facebook of blogging (in a bad way)?
You have a nice service, but this is too much. Also, it prompted me to take another look at your terms of service, which are surprisingly onerous. You've lost a user and an advocate. Good luck.
Good. Tell em! Even better that you're taking a real stand by putting your money where your feet are and moving on. Oh, shit, Posterous is free. Maybe send them a check for the valuable service they did provide you before moving on.
And really, what better blog alternative are you even going to go to?
Free services need a business model. And they need to be transparent about that business model, preferably up front.
If you move on because you disagree with a change in policy you do not owe a free service anything for the time they provided you, I really don't understand where you got that idea. It's not up to the end user to structure a service.
If Facebook decides on some silly move tomorrow which causes users to leave in droves that does not mean we owe them for the time before, the same holds true for posterous.
They could have avoided this by publishing it in their corporate blog and by clearly stating their affiliate trick in the terms of service. Anything less simply won't do, especially not after four months. After all, the only reason it is four months is because some user walked in to it after four months, it could have been eight just the same.
I wonder if they would be calling it an 'experiment' then too, or if they would agree too that that is stretching credulity.
I hate corporate speech.
They should have just written:
"Sorry guys & girls, we've messed up on this one, we have amended the terms of service, and we've reset the 'viglink' flag on all existing accounts, if you feel like giving us a hand then please re-enable it but if you don't we understand.".
That would have taken a bit more guts though, but I'll bet you it would have been received a lot better and would have possibly been a net plus for them.
Sachin, if I were hypothetically your in-house SEO, and I read this post at 3 AM in the morning, I would call you on your cell phone and wake you up. The potential for business-level risk terrifies me.
My guess is that you get a huge portion of your traffic from Google. Google needs the Internet's link graph to work. Dynamically retargeting links would be a catastrophe for Google if it caught on. It is possible that Google will say "Well, that is our problem", but I wouldn't predict that based on their previous behavior.
Google Ventures is a semi-autonomous fund. I would say that their participation does not necessarily imply synergy with Google, nor does it imply that Google's search team has vetted the impact on their results.
They really thought this through. I was wondering why they didn't implement the "technology" in-house, without having to split their ramen with VigLink, but it looks like a well played position.
Since the changes are made using Javascript, would Google even notice? Meaning, wouldn't their link graph be unaffected? I doubt they run each page through javascriot when indexing (then again, this is Google).
The only bit that doesn't sync there is where you mention how you've attempted to make it un noticable to users. That doesn't feel 100% open. It's not about making a blog post about it - it's about having it in the TOS and FAQ. Otherwise it looks like your trying to hide it - which feels sneaky :-p
We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all.
If middle-click is broken, then it does interfere with user experience.
The fact that it took 4 months for someone to really notice this is a testament to how unobtrusive it is.
Others have noticed it prior to this, Shamrin is just the first to blog about this. This is a horrible line of discussion, btw - to attempt to downplay your customers issues with "well, no one noticed".
Thanks for your post. I love posterous services, but I think the affiliate link feature should be disclosed and clearly highlighted before the user signs up. You might say it doesn't affect user experience at all, but I disagree. Sometimes the viglinks add an extra one or two forwarding urls and this can delay the user getting to the link, and when they get to the link, it's a long affiliate link, rather than a short URL I originally posted. Also, there's the issue where some bloggers aren't comfortable with the affiliate links. All in all, this should be disclosed and highlighted in the sign up/feature page.
To some extent, I would be more worried about the effect this would have on blogs hosted by Posterous. If I'm reading a blog and I find it doing something sneaky to track my behaviour, I'm not going to care whether it is the blogger or the host service, I'm just going to stick all related domains/IPs in the appropriate kill file under "don't spy on me".
I'm curious as to whether you considered if this would have any effect on PageRank for content you host?
This type of behavior - using javascript to present the user with links different than the googlebot found - seems like the type of thing they frown on.
Unless googlebot runs a javascript engine, I don't think it will ever be able to find out... unless a human over there reads this and adds this information to their PageRank database.
Google does this themselves for their search engine pages, in a way... if you have JavaScript running, there is an onmousedown pingback added for every link in the search results so they know what you click on. The link itself remains apparently unaffected. Check it out if you have Firebug/Web Inspector, each link has e.g. onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','','012394AFC')".
Google does execute javascript, and even some flash, but not on all its crawlers (which is very understandable; building a DOM for every page on the web is expensive, even for Google. I say "build a DOM" because abstract interpretation is still far off, specially for the web and its cruft of languages, standards and quirks.)
This is interesting, but it leads me to ask, what can you expect a JavaScript-enabled web crawler do? Load the page into the DOM, wait a few seconds for the dust to settle, start firing click events on everything and recording what requests are generated? It would seem a crawler could cause some really undesirable behavior on your site if that were the case. Imagine click events that post comments, delete things, downvote them, or generate emails. Since they are hidden behind JavaScript a web developer might expect a crawler not to try them...
There have been a few discussions about this topic in the past, and in the end it boils down to the developer being smart about the way he does requests.
I'm quite sure (wish I could remember where I read it) the crawler only actually performs GETs (which makes total sense because GET was always meant for retrieving and listing data), so a smart developer would use other HTTP methods (PUT, POST, DELETE) for actions that have modify existing application data.
We’ve avoided commenting until Posterous decided what they wanted to do in order to avoid interfering in what is no doubt a sensitive matter for them.
VigLink leaves decisions around disclosure up to our customers. Our terms of service require publishers to comply with all applicable local regulations but as these are still new and evolving, we leave it to our customer to judge what is most appropriate for their specific communities and their local legal jurisdiction.
In the coming weeks we will be working to make it easier for publishers to disclose the use of VigLink through branded badges a publisher may add to their site, linking to a clear explanation of what we do and offering the ability for a permanent customer opt-out. However, the ultimate decisions on how best to disclose will remain in the hands of our customers.
A few points of technical clarification:
We and our competitors do not affect the PageRank of a page. We have received assurances from Google that this is so (we are backed by Google Ventures) and Danny Sullivan has written that he’s received the same guidance from Google. (http://searchengineland.com/viglink-fire-forget-solution-to-...) Our publishers who watch these things closely report no change in PageRank as a result of using our code.
Posterous was not overwriting any existing affiliate links. Neither are 99% of our customers. The option is available for customers who would like it (those who run forums prohibiting commercial links for example) but very few have done so.
We work hard not to “break the web” – we don’t use redirects, ad blockers work as intended and even if our servers are unreachable the page continues to behave as expected. We’ve gotten reports that middle clicks under some circumstances were mis-behaving and so we’ve disabled all modified click rewriting until we get this issue sorted out.
We also work closely with merchants and affiliate networks to ensure we are meeting the requirements of their programs. Some merchants have “blacklists” or “whitelists” and we only affiliate links from publishers that those merchants find acceptable.
Any link can be marked “not rewriteable” by adding the attribute rel=”noskim” to the anchor tag. We will add a global tag that allows a page author to easily opt the whole page out of being rewritten.
Offering the ability for our customers to share the revenue with their customers is something we are investigating. There are numerous technical and business challenges involved but we hope to be able to offer this ability where appropriate in the future.
VigLink believes that sites that facilitate commercial activity are contributing to the ecosystem and unobtrusively deriving revenue from that activity is entirely appropriate. We recognize that community expectations about what is acceptable will vary widely and we think decisions about what’s most appropriate in a given context are best left to our customers. We are working to provide even more tools for all our customers meet the expectations of their community.
If you have comments or concerns about VigLink, you can contact us at feedback@viglink.com or me personally at oroup@viglink.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
Posterous partnered with Viglink.com back in December as an experiment to see if we could generate revenue by adding an affiliate code to links that don't already have one. We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all.
1. Links in Posterous posts are not edited in any way 2. Viglink javascript intercepts clicks and adds an affiliate code when possible 3. Affiliate codes are not stripped or altered if they already exist 4. Copying links is unchanged
Before deploying this change, we tested it heavily to make sure we weren't doing anything that would be visible to the publisher or reader. The fact that it took 4 months for someone to really notice this is a testament to how unobtrusive it is.
Some people have commented that we should be sharing revenue back to the users. You are absolutely right. This is something we mentioned to Viglink at our very first meeting with them and something we will add when it's technically possible.
Admittedly, we should have announced this on our blog. This was definitely an oversight on our part. Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content.
From Posterous, we apologize. Going forward we will be sure to notify you of any changes we make to the site.
With regards to viglink: we really appreciate all your feedback and we're going to evaluate our use of the service going forward.
-Sachin cofounder, posterous.com