Anecdotally: Just about everyone I've met who run affiliate marketing and/or direct marketing companies (not necessarily their employees, but definitely the owners) are probably the most shady individuals I have ever dealt with.
I've worked for a small affiliate marketing company, and they were some of the nicest people I've ever met (including the owners). There was no shady SEO and there were no weird business practices. Just a lot of good ideas and hard work.
It is sort of like SEO: it gets a bad rap from a contingent of the market who perpetuate abuses. This man, for example, made hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales by facilitating theft. (There is no other way to describe rebilling if you understand what the game is.)
"For me, the biggest money makers.....2008, 2009 were rebill offers"
He stole money. If you don't know what rebill means look it up.
Example of rebill:
10 years ago I bought a computer from Best Buy and got free internet from AOL for 6 months. I never used it. After 6 months AOL started billing me. Somewhere in the fine print it mentioned they would start billing me automatically after 6 months.
Many rebillers don't have contact info so cancelling is difficult.
They are, but mainly because banks are revoking merchant accounts of those who use rebills and have high chargeback levels. The FTC, banks, and Google are all cracking down on shady affiliate stuff right now. As you said, the next few years should be interesting.
Agreed. Back in the first year of university I did some affiliate marketing (not in quite the same way but similar) and made around $10K or so with a lot of work.
It's possible to do it ethically, which is what I tried very hard to do (at the end of the day it's just advertising and a lot of it depends on the product). But it becomes incredibly difficult to pick products that aren't essentially rip offs. The affiliate networks are as much trying to scam the marketers (which is why his advice of picking only the bigger networks is good).
I used to market stuff similar to what JML sell (i.e. fairly niche "time save" appliances). Most of the products were good - but ultimately the kind of thing you buy on a whim and then use once or twice a year.
The margins aren't great for the time input [nearly failed my first year outright] so I moved on to other pastures (where ethics were more prevalent too)
The problem is that the real money in affiliate marketing is in the shady stuff, and the shady ads (with the most payout) take over the "good" and "decent" ads.
Sure there are legitimate affiliate marketers making decent money (like someone established with a good forum on webhosting), but another problem is that for an upstart to do that they have to apply less honest methods.
Have some of you on the moral high ground ever considered the ethics of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of investor money, promising a huge payout, and then squandering it? No? That's what hundreds of angel-backed startups do every year.
Affiliates create value and jobs for their customers and contribute in a positive way to the economy.
How much value has your zero-revenue startup created for anyone?
Defensive much? I think it's laughable to try and compare the morals of a lot of shady affiliate mechanisms (rebill, anyone?) to the morals of taking investor cash.
For one thing, nobody has promised a huge payout. Investors have evaluated the risk of your company before making their investment, and unless you do something stupid with the money (e.g., send everyone on vacation) there's really no ethical issue with it. If you gave it your all and fail, there's no way you can twist this into some sort of ethical issue. Doing so IMHO is dishonest and self-deluding.
The "jobs and economy" defense is also pretty flimsy. Spam also creates jobs, value for their clients, and contributes to the economy, are we going to start defending that now?
There's no question that a large portion of affiliate marketing falls on the wrong side of morals/ethics, if not the law. The bulk of what I've seen out of that corner of the intertubes is scams that prey on unsuspecting consumers... to compare this with legitimate web startups is really puzzling.
This isn't just holier-than-thou posturing, honestly. I've done shady things in the past for a quick buck, but at least I've never deluded myself into thinking what I was doing was good.
[edit] Poster below has a point, saying "bulk of" to describe the entire affiliate industry is unfair.
I agree that there are some offers/advertisers that are scams that have no place in the industry.
But a continuity offer that clearly discloses its terms (think Netflix) is really not unethical in any way, and your blanket dismissal of affiliate marketing is ridiculous.
I've seen people say on here that ALL advertising is shady and unethical because it makes people spend money on things they don't need. Statements like this are the reason you aren't making any money online.
There's probably a lot more affiliate marketing out there than you realize, it's just the obvious (and scammy) ones that you and most others view as being "affiliate marketing". There's plenty of legitimate affiliate marketing out there, though. How many blogs have you seen with an Amazon widget? Chances are, if a reader buys something from Amazon after clicking that widget, they get a percentage kickback from that. It's just performance based advertising rather than click or view based.
Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have the people making shell sites with sales pitches and shady offers crowding up the Google results, and forums of people trying to figure out how to make a quick buck without adding anything of value. But you get that with adsense and other types of advertising as well.
But, as I see it, many customers sign up for rebill trial offers because they think they can a) game the system and get something for free or b) are truy gaming the system, signing up for offers to get cash as part of so-called "incentivized traffic"
I'm sure there are some unsuspecting consumers who just want to try something and shouldn't have a hard time cancelling.
The problem here isn't the affiliate networks, or the affiliates. It's the advertisers. They are the companies responsible for customer service and providing an ethical experience.
I agree that the bulk of fault lies with the advertisers themselves, but that's also the same argument spammers make - don't shoot the messenger and the such.
The reality is that it's plainly obvious to the marketer if their offers are legitimate or scams, and when this awareness is so clear it's hard to ride the moral high ground and claim innocence.
It's like giving someone a bag of candy where you know a large portion is poisonous - sure, you didn't poison the candies yourself, but to say that you're faultless IMHO is disingenuous.
Maybe as shady as any other 'man in the middle' deal - for instance insurance brokers, realtors, etc
So many websites do affiliate marketing in some form that you can't just throw them all in a bucket of 'shady'.
If you do a blog post comparing slicehost to linode, and have your signup links in it, that's affiliate marketing. Nothing particularly shady about that.
Moreso - I worked with a direct marketer / affiliate marketing agency for the first 8 months I held a full-time job; they were primarily in lead generation, of course, and got most of their leads from other lead generation companies, who got theirs from still others.. at the end of the road, those leads were coming from people paying bottom dollar for half-baked PHP apps. And by the time those leads actually reached the entity (online education, in our instance), they had changed hands three, five, and sometimes more times.
At each instance, of course, their personal information passed through companies who had no moral qualms about holding onto those leads and passing them off to a future client as new.
That seems to be the case with this guy as well. "richoffyou: Google wouldn't be where it is today without people like me feeding its revenue. Google = value." Delusional.
