A Sad Day in Affiliate Marketing
posted in Affiliate Marketing |It’s a sad day in affiliate marketing and the prevention in the freedom of speech when the bullies cry wolf & claim to be bullied in an attempt to suffocate comments, opinions & a few home truths about certain networks by possibly applying leverage of their own. The latest request on the affiliates4u forum may have brought this to the fore with regard to networks being asked to simply disclose which programs on their network have closed bidding groups with some being reluctant or refusing to do so like Buy.at (refused), DGM (reluctant), Affilinet (refused) & Commission Junction (no reply). You can see for yourself where comments may have been removed, but we have a copy on notepad for safe keeping to publish later pertaining to each individual network.
Unfortunately it may possibly be that Matt, who owns the forum is indeed in an unenviable position … caught between a rock and a hard place … a gentleman to core & a friend who I have the upmost respect for.
Some of the networks involvement on the forum have traditionally been lacklustre or failed to address issues adequately, some have been very good, however it’s understandable that without network support the forum would not be able to continue with get2gethers, and events, and a4uexpo would certainly not be possible – these are all good things Matt & his team have done in helping to develop & shape the industry togther with the networks generosity.
Affiliates with blogs lend themselves to freedom of speech & to be unnecessarily censored which allow those affiliates to freely express their educated thoughts & experiences within affiliate marketing, they also cast a larger net capturing a wider audience. Something which certain networks are maybe trying to prevent from happening on the affiliates4u forum via their own leveraging & crying to mummy.
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic industry, more pros than cons, but it won’t mature & be respected unless there is trust & transparency.
Any of my observations are from personal experience & commenting, is not attacking, most of the time I am probably being quite placid and doesn’t intefere with my day to day workload, I could quite merrily skip through the daisies & daffodils and ignore it all, but sometimes aspects need to be commented upon. There are ways of doing things slyly or more openly. So are we now required to pretend that all is light & fluffy in the world of make believe with sugarplumb fairies & pixies dancing on the breeze? … cos some networks say so … what Twerps!
It just strikes me that some networks are trying to censor & gag the affiliate community with their own repressive actions and maybe about time they shed their excessive narcissisms and start actually realising that affiliates may actually have a point.
I think instead, I’ll keep my most of my opinions on the blog, but with the disposible income we have available, I could simply do paid search advertising and generate enough eyeballs via that route if we desired, most probably a lot more too, together with aggregating other affiliates comments or pointing to their blogs with their interesting observations . Maybe we could publish the programs we think might have closed groups too after we have contacted the merchants directly, if we can find the time & anyhow they are already in the public domain if you do a bit of searching, so most probably that task will be delegated.
PS Now it’s not purely pertaining to this closed group thread on the forum, though questions can now possibly be asked, how dependent is their fragile business model on closed groups? Do they have anything to hide? Is their reluctance to disclose can in part be inferred that they actually don’t wish to be transparent and thus untrustworthy? It’s not exactly spyware, but I wonder how they would react to more serious or probing questions than something which can be gleaned from the public domain.