Increasingly I’ve come across products where every single review was a 4 or 5 star “I got a discount/free product/kilo of cocaine/blowjob in exchange for an honest review” reviews.
Getting free stuff (or even a discount) makes us want to reciprocate - this is a built-in human psychological bias that can affect us even if we are aware of it. And that pro-product bias is without the incentive of the hope for more free stuff one may get for writing positive reviews. Add in selective solicitation of people who have been pre-vetted as being positive about the product (or willing to write a positive review) and you get obscure products with sometimes hundreds of misleading and more-than-useless positive reviews.
Yeah I have seen this too. Went on a page, ordered something. When I ordered it again (using the ‘buy again’ button), it was a slightly different knock-off product!
Now you have to trawl the comments and reviews to make sure you are getting the right seller.
They are definitely selling Product X and shipping Product Y, which surely is a legal grey area. How much they know about it on a case-by-case basis is unclear.
If it is one of the editors then it isn’t so much as an ad as hey I got this thingy and really like it/use it a lot. They find it useful and want to share and an affiliate link is a few pennies to keep the site running.
The actual ads are the Stacksocal store and now meh store and at least for Stacksocial we make fun of those posts regularly.
The problem is that with the fulfilment programme, even stuff marked as ‘prime eligible’ can be a knock-off. Sellers just send the dodgy goods to the Amazon warehouse.
It might seem like that, and there is certainly an element of truth to that, but the Amazon Affiliate links are actually an important source of income for the site and the individual editors. And, in fact, you don’t have to buy the product they linked to for them to make money. Instead, all they have to do is get you to click just once. That’s all it takes.
Each editor has their own personal affiliate account. When you click on one of their links to Amazon, that individual editor then gets a cut of everything you put in your Amazon shopping cart in the next 24 hours and complete the purchase of within 89 days. Hence the affiliate links to things such as a 55 gallon barrel of lube - yes, Xeni makes money off of that link. Nobody has to specifically buy the linked $1,000+ barrel of lube for her to make money. And Rob makes money off of his negative review of crappy tea lights, because people click on the link to see what the fuss is about, and some of them put stuff in their Amazon cart within 24 hours of that click.
While the reviews of Amazon linked products on BB may be utterly honest, it seems that that at least some posts are written with the purpose of including Amazon Affiliate links, and some posts have opportunistic links awkwardly inserted - Cory even managed to slip a promo and affiliate link for Game of Thrones DVDs into a post about the hijacking of the Hugos. This is likely exacerbated because each individual editor profits directly by how many affiliate links they post rather than indirectly from a shared pool of money from a single account for BB.
So, I would say that affiliate links are definitely ads. Amazon agrees, and calls them that in their Affiliate agreement. Management, though, has disagreed with me on that point in the past, though. So, call them ads at your BB BBS account’s peril
However, I still like BB and it remains one of my favorite sites, like a favorite uncle who has some flaws, but is still one of your best relatives.
The problem of counterfeits, though, is that we often don’t know we have them. Instead we think the brand just sucks now. I had a product I bought from Amazon fail on me. Does the famous brand just suck now? Or is it counterfeit? I have no way to know.
This is the scariest problem in rock climbing today. These knock-off brands are NOT passing the same stringent safety requirements as all other life-saving climbing gear.
PLEASE spread the word to anyone you know who climbs.
Is this where I go to tell everyone to stop buying from Amazon in the first place and support local businesses? I know it takes you longer to get your stuff, but your local shopkeeper cares a lot more about you and the community.
Seriously we get a lot of stuff from Amazon, and reading this makes me want to scream. And doesn’t the TPP include things like “no more made-in-China (or wherever) labels?” Not that that helps, but it does work for things that are supposedly legitimate (like pet-food) made in China that we’d want to stay away from regardless.
