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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.).
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.
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.
I've thought a lot about this, and long wondered why it's such a common feeling in journalism that ads (however speculative and low-quality) are somehow better than things like affiliate links.
If someone writes reviews (about lots of books, for example) and all of them have an affiliate link, regardless of whether it's a positive or negative review, and they state clearly, somewhere (rather somewhere on their blog/site than in every link) that they get a percentage of each copy sold, I think that's a good thing. I think they should, and they should tell the reader that if they buy the book via this link, they help support the magazine.
Combined with BrandonM's suggestion to steer readers in the "right" direction, and point them to another item instead ("this book wasn't that good, but this book about a similar subject is worth picking up!), that's a nice service which nobody should have to be ashamed about.
Of course this suggests that readers have a reason to trust you, but then again (as BrandonM points out): If they don't, why are they reading your review?
"You can usually identify affiliate links pretty easily just by scanning the URL."
The problem is that most people barely know what an affiliate link is, let alone spot one. This fact makes producing biased reviews attractive and that's why I think the answer to nate's question should be: generally they are.
Personally I don't trust a review when I see an affiliate link. A 'sponsored link' disclaimer would reestablish my trust though.
I would argue that people with the capability to recognize an affiliate link should also have the intelligence/judgment necessary to determine whether a review is unbiased or not. In effect, I think a "sponsored link" disclaimer is pointless. Personally, when I see a such a disclaimer, I practically assume that the article will be slanted. I would rather make that judgment myself.
Furthermore, as I pointed out it's not only affiliate links that can slant a review. I'm taking any review I read with a grain of salt, and my estimation of the author's or publication's integrity is a large factor in how much faith I have in a review. This is why it is such a big deal when stories come out like the TechCrunch author who demanded merchandise in exchange for reviews.
I agree - if I saw "sponsored link" in a review, I would assume that the review itself was somehow sponsored.
Perhaps some other type of notice would be more appropriate, but I can't think of what that would be.
To me a statement which is somewhat prominent on the page, always in the same place, stating that we always use affiliate links in our reviews, explaining what affiliate links are and that, if you are interested in buying the book, you can help support the blog/magazine by buying it via their link, would be a good thing.
I agree, but I'm not so sure that it has to be prominent. I think it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the footer, as long as the footer is visible at the end of a typical review. I also feel like it would make sense for some sites to have a "How do we make money?" page. Not only does it promote openness and integrity, but as a satisfied visitor to such a site I would probably try to do what I could to help that site make money. That could mean turning off adblocker for that site, buying a recommended product through an affiliate link, or even giving a direct donation. Call me crazy, but I think people who appreciate and get value from a company are willing to do what they can to help that company out.
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.
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?
Amazon has this nice feature where you get commissions on everything the person buys on your click. If someone buys a copy of Rework and happens to pick up a new high-end DSLR at the same time, you just made a few hundred bucks.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?