Well, then, it seems like all reasonable roads point to clear disclosures of paid links in the posts, then you even get “ironic” profits. Though, does it occur to you, that the metrics are operant conditioning you to write successful ad copy, and that that is what your posts now are, even if they are hipster, ironic ads?
BTW, I do not begrudge B making money off of affiliate links, as I noted in the OP. I just think the links should be clearly disclosed in the posts, in a way the average consumer (including me) can tell which are which.
Sure, but in this strange mix of curiosity, financial gain, perverse glee, the results are generally counted in cents for products like that.
On the other hand, I (or anyone else with a readership like ours) could make a five or even six-figure sum with an undisclosed ad post or two on the sly, and no amount of FTC disclosure requirement would ever inform anyone.
It’s pointless, the idea that little link disclosures could mean anything beyond a tiny fable to make a certain kind of skeptic feel a little more comfortable with a situation where their trust has already lapsed.
that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out better and more helpful forms of disclosure, just that the specific one you (and others) often raise is more fraught than it appears. It has the same structural problems as, say, the Curator’s Code.
tldr; If we wanted money and were willing to be sleazy to get it, we wouldn’t be doing it with affiliate links.
You know I could say the same about any of the openness transparency issues BB has advocated for in the past - somebody could cheat and I’d never find out. Is that really an argument against openness in general? Or on BB?
Well, the point is that formal, close-proximity disclosure is a superficial and ostentatious form of transparency that (in my experience) has no discernible effect on behavior, can act as a distracting fig-leaf, may highlight and deepen mistrust, and encourages a culture of facile ethical oneupmanship.
More superficial than being buried in the privacy policy? And transparency “deepens mistrust”? Well, as opposed to the misplaced trust you get when people don’t know about each of the affiliate links? The mistrust is, perhaps, merited. That people should, perhaps, distrust other sites more isn’t really a sound argument for why Boing Boing shouldn’t.
Your point about a lack of change in outcomes cuts both ways. I might make me think “Fuck it. Clearly it doesn’t make a difference.” Or “Why the fuck not? It doesn’t harm your sales, and it’s open. Seems all good to me.” I lean towards open, as I’ve always thought BB did.
How relevant are these disclosures? I mean, are readers expected to be familiar with everything Doctorow has ever written, just because in one of his pieces he disclosed that he makes 8% off of every Amazon affiliate link sale?
Would a single disclosure on my home page that “many of the products I discuss on this site are provided to me free by their manufacturer” be enough?
A single disclosure doesn’t really do it because people visiting your site might read individual reviews or watch individual videos without seeing the disclosure on your home page.
Would a button that says DISCLOSURE, LEGAL, or something like that be sufficient disclosure?
No. A button isn’t likely to be sufficient. How often do you click on those buttons when you visit someone else’s site? If you provide the information as part of your message, your audience is less likely to miss it.
Do you really think that your “privacy” section is the best place to disclose material financial relationships (as opposed to the fact that you share data with Amazon)?
You mean that not all posts qualify. Some posts likely do. Most posts that mention products on BB are positive. I’m not sure that all of those posts would have been written if they couldn’t include a revenue-generating affiliate link. 8% times all of the purchases made by clickthoughs (even if not to the linked product) likely adds up for a popular blog like BB.
And you’ve already said that all posts are transactional at some level, which kind of makes it harder to distinguish those posts where you get dollars up front (which qualifies for sponsored or advertisement) or where you get dollars on the back end (which qualifies for nothing other than a disclosure in your privacy policy).
Out of curiosity, were they actually buying the tea-lights reviewed, or were they buying other stuff after following your link?
I feel that i should call out when a manufacturer sends me a review unit and I have not paid for the item I am reviewing – book, gadget or otherwise. However, if I paid for the thing I am reviewing then I feel the blanket BB statement in the footer is enough. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all?
I think you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Try it from the perspective of a consumer.
As a consumer, I want to know if you have a financial interest related to the product you are writing about. Whether you got the product for free, or get paid for selling the product via an affiliate link doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that you are getting something, and that could affect your writing.
I could even look at it the reverse of the way you are. I could say, heck, you already got the free thing so you are more free to write what you really feel. But in a review, that you are hoping to get money from via the affiliate link, that you might be tempted to pimp the product more to generate more clicks… (Though the free stuff argument is often that people hope for more free stuff by writing positive reviews, thus biasing them, consciously or unconsciously (humans have a built in, subconscious bias for reciprocity).)
My trust of you guys is part faith in the Boing Boing brand as an advocate for openness, and against sneakiness in government, media, corporations and individuals, and part because you have your own credibility based your your previous posts and credible, personal writing styles. But that faith, mine anyways, is broken when I find to my surprise that buried in those credible, personal seeming posts is a whole swath of undisclosed paid links, and further broken when Rob argues on behalf of the Boing Boing brand strongly for opacity, using a sort of PoMo Orwellian that I still haven’t fully parsed.
That is simply not true. In a review we are recommending something we like. We make money off a steady drum beat of reviews, but we don’t have specific goals or expectations on a per post basis. We do not “pimp the product more” – we simply don’t review things we aren’t personally enthusiastic about.
Affiliate links make money for us by there being a constant drum beat of them out there, while some links may drive more revenue than others, we generally have no idea what will and won’t, and it averages out over time.
Currently we are comfortable with how we are disclosing affiliate links. We aren’t in violation of the FTC guidelines from our read and we rarely get complaints. We will be listening and paying attention, as we do care and do not want to mislead people. We love our audience and we hope it shows.
I run afoul of my own bad assumptions all the time. Only I generally hold the guilty party to account, which in terms of choosing my assumptions, is me.
Also, I ghostery and adblock the fuck out of this place, with some exceptions, because I do want to pay for the pennies worth of free ice cream. I learned of Ghostery and such software… here. What schemers!! They probably profit from that, too!
Come on. The FTC guidelines clearly and specifically say that the disclosures must be located near the actual links, and not buried anywhere. I think @beschizza has essentially conceded that by dismissing the FTC guidelines as unenforceable government pablum, and saying they are really aimed at scummy sites and not fine, upstanding, and ethical operators like BB. It also sounds like you do get a fair number of complaints, but @beschizza is content to dismiss them based on their tone and/or who is making the complaints.
I thought @beschizza’s argument was that you do review things you aren’t enthusiastic about?
Even if you are enthusiastic about a product, the added incentive of earning revenue can make it more attractive to write about that product (as opposed to not writing anything or writing about something that wouldn’t generate revenue). And the ability to easily generate revenue from Amazon means you might link to them even if the product is available cheaper from elsewhere.
The reality is that it is very possible to determine what links bring in more money and what your viewers end up buying. Amazon provides this information to you. You might link to one product, and discover that your earnings from that link actually come as a result of people buying other products (for which you still get the credit so long as they buy or add it to their cart within 24 hours of following your link). Maybe nobody at BB does this, or examines the data, but it is very possible to figure out what people are buying and to tailor your future links and recommendations over time. The fact that you are aware that some links generate more revenue than others suggests that you are paying at least some attention.
I didn’t say this, of course. What I said was that a specific form of disclosure, the parenthetical “PAID LINK”, is a superficial and ostentatious form of transparency that, among other things, may deepen mistrust (if it is privileged over more humane forms of trust, etc)
I feel that you’re reducing yourself to bad-faith word games here.
This particular discussion (usually a gamergate thing, natch) never goes anywhere because the underlying premise—adherence to a formal metric of disclosure as the Pascal’s Wager of journalistic ethics—is just never going to wash with us. We might do something more consistent eventually, if it looks and feels right to us.
I’m sorry if this means you just can’t trust us, but we will all soldier on.
[quote=“jlw, post:49, topic:51967”]
That is simply not true. In a review we are recommending something we like. We make money off a steady drum beat of reviews, but we don’t have specific goals or expectations on a per post basis. We do not “pimp the product more” – we simply don’t review things we aren’t personally enthusiastic about. [/quote]
Again, you are using your insider’s view, not the perspective of a consumer.
And you are using arguments I suspect you would not buy in other circumstances. A politician could easily say “In a bill I am recommending something I like – I simply don’t introduce bills I’m not personally enthusiastic about.” Would you buy that as a sufficient argument against laws requring public disclosure of campaign donations? I wouldn’t. And I don’t buy that same argument from you regarding disclosing affiliate links.
You are currently comfortable with hiding your affiliate links with a global disclosure hidden in your privacy policy? Really? You really think that comports with the intent of the guidelines, which is to prevent consumer confusion and insure that consumers know which products you have a financial interest in? I find such a position incredible, in both senses of the word.
Indeed, sir, you are lawyering the FTC guidelines! This is the point! They’re guidelines, issued by one country’s state regulator, concerning affiliate marketers, with no enforcement precedents, and whose trivial specificity is undermined by its own vagueness and the things that always seem to get left out of these lengthy, stentorian assertions of its legal weight:
There is no fine for not complying with an FTC guide.
Are you monitoring bloggers?
We’re not monitoring bloggers and we have no plans to. If concerns about possible violations of the FTC Act come to our attention, we’ll evaluate them case by case. If law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus will be advertisers, not endorsers – just as it’s always been.
And the classic "If the audience gets the relationship, a disclosure isn’t needed. "
Not that this should be trusted, either. I’m just pointing out that even the most plain-spoken parts of these guidelines are amenable to astounding amounts of internet lawyering. It’s just a big pile of regulatory waffle and we’ll stick with our own half-baked opinions and policies for now.
You are invoking a comparison to Gamergate??? I really can’t see as how that Godwinesque non-sequitur deserves anything other than a big “fuck you”.
I’ve tried to be open, rational, thoughtful. You have called my posts “the worst kind of internet lawyering” and now compared them to Gamergate. That’s just taking a giant dump on polite, rational discourse.
Yes, the entire disclosure-based system is usually a gamer-gate discussion. Which I suppose is why securities regulations are based on disclosure. And why public officials have to disclose financial holdings.
“For the record, I always disclose when a book review was generated from a free galley, ARC or finished book (if the book is a printed manuscript or an ebook, I sometimes skip it, since I tear off and discard sheets from the former and generally delete the latter once I’m through with it)”
A lawyer once complained we were trampling on people’s human rights by banning them from our comment forum. He explained it at some length and I was impressed by his reasoning. Then I banned him for being from New Zealand.
I made no assertion of its legal weight. I made no claims about its enforcement history, and acknowledged your dismissal of it on this regard (by the way, I often read on BB about how issuing [fraudulent] DMCA takedown notices without evaluating fair use defences can result in penalties, but there has yet to be a single enforcement along these lines, either).
The question is whether the audience gets the relationship. I’m not sure that the audience does, and this thread is evidence that at least some of the audience doesn’t.
I guess I simply don’t understand the downside to prominent and proximate disclosure. If readers already trust you, I’m not sure I buy the argument that increased disclosure will lead to less trust, and I’m not sure I buy the argument that these disclosures will cheapen the trust. On other sites they may provide a veneer of trust, but we’re not talking about other sites.
I suspect that both the reader and contributors here will feel uncomfortable reading& writing explicit disclosures that BB makes money off of many links, as it will lend a somewhat mercantile feel to many entries—even though this is simply making explicit what already happens. If this is true, I think the source of this discomfort is worth reflecting upon.
Maybe you should have banned him for not using his real name, which is what the truly disreputable forums do.
