Well, not to be a dick about it, but there are like five people in this thread and two of us are paid to be here.
The downside of proximate disclosure is, in a nutshell, I know about this, it’s Boing Boing, they’ve always had these links, they’ve always been honest about their existence, so why are they doing this stupid fig-leaf thing now? What changed?
The ecumenical tension is between a core audience that is in on the conspiracy and whose trust has been earned, and a transitory cloud-audience that doesn’t know us from jack and demands we earn it with easily-identifiable formalities.
The latter position corresponds with a growing tide of mistrust and discontent with web marketing and journalistic credibility in general. But that mistrust and discontent is also being coopted and focused by morons and trollies (NOT YOU GUYS), so I’m inclined to act slowly and keep talking.
And we are talking and listening. I don’t take any of this as accusatory or inflammatory, except where it clearly is, but really as good input from readers and community members who want to improve everyones experience. The fact that we do listen and that we’ve made changes, albeit slowly, based on their input lets me believe we aren’t all that evil.
To clarify, I don’t think we’re in violation of the FTC guidelines because it really isn’t entirely clear if they apply to us in the presence of alternative disclosures (and other reasons that I might cherrypick out from the text), but also doubt it matters whether we’re in violation of them, because it’s “regulatory pabulum” with no enforcement mechanism, explicit disinterest in fining or otherwise punishing editorial operations, and our servers are in Canada.
(Somewhere in the distance, a properly-formed DMCA complaint barked.)
It’s like you are on a war against disclosure, which seems the opposite of what I thought BB has often championed, openness and transparency, such as being for Lawrence Lessig’s fight against the corrupting influence of special interests in government, for open software, etc. and against sneaky things, such as sneaky disclosures in fine print.
Now we have you equating those good things with Gamergate to shut the conversation down. That’s really, really disappointing. I figured I might get some push back, or we’re sticking with the status quo, but not being tarred and feathered with your giant Gamergate brush.
There are non-GG folks and long-time readers who do care about how they’re advertised to by BB.
On the other hand, I agree that affiliate links are fairly innocuous and I’m sure <BLINK>PAID LINK</BLINK> isn’t the right solution here.
Maybe this isn’t a concession you want to make but it would be easy enough to make affiliate links a slightly different color. Not worth the effort if it’s just a couple people complaining, but one possible solution.
The guidelines are just to give you best practices to avoid consumer confusion, not hyper detailed rules.
Earlier you said
[quote=“beschizza”]There’s an element in all this of performance and posture, that it’s
more important to follow the technical letter and form of a vaguely-defined and unenforceable regulatory wish-list than to actually be human beings pursuing particular ethical standards and talking about them openly in public. [/quote]
Now it sounds like you are arguing the :technical letter and form" in your desire to maintain the status quo rather than just “being a human being” and doing the ethical (and trivially easy to do) thing that would eliminate any question of consumer confusion.
(Note that you are the one who invoked the word “ethics” in this conversation, not me, in so much as that may recall “Gamergate”, which I’m still pissed that you invoked.)
On the contrary, I’m in favor of honest, vocal, disclosure and promotion of affiliate links, in authors’ own voices, on an ongoing (but not blindingly repetitious) basis that clues readers into the thinking behind it, the technical details of how it works, and how it affects what’s published.
But I don’t like the idea of mandatory one-size-fits-all disclosure text immediately by every instance of a link (as opposed to, say, the bottom of the page in some form). For reasons already described, they strike me variously as ugly, misleading, and open to abuse.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of text at the end of the post, in the same font and format as the post, in the author’s own words. (Right now it’s fixed template text in the footer further down)
But that is still not consonant with FTC guidelines, so even if this particular thread likes that idea, it won’t stop the next thread from happening!
Interesting suggestion. Though, and I almost hate to bring up the handy FTC guides to reasonableness in disclosure, obscure things that aren’t obvious to a consumer don’t make for reasonable disclosures. In the .com Disclosure guide they give an example that seems on point:
[quote=“FTC .com Disclosure Guide”]
Julie Brown’s endorsement is followed by a symbol consisting of the letters “FS” in a circle that is intended to disclose that she received a free sample (in this case, a free camera) in exchange for providing her endorsement.
Icons, abbreviations, and symbols such as this are not adequate to prevent a claim from being misleading if they do not provide sufficient clues about why a claim is qualified or about the nature of the disclosure, or if consumers simply do not understand their meaning. The fact that the icon or symbol also functions as a hyperlink to an explanation of its meaning would not be sufficient to make the disclosure clear and conspicuous.[/quote]
I think just changing the color of a link would fall into that category.
And, again, the FTC guidelines are not the law itself, but they are best practices to help you stay inside of the law. And they are generally just reasonable best practices.
This is the sort of cleverness that appeals to me, as it reduces the costs of systematic inline disclosure (doesn’t interrupt the text, doesn’t show off, doesn’t distract, isn’t ugly, isn’t stupid). But it is a bad idea, as it would be only obvious to regulars – which again leads us to the problem that it’s not really disclosing anything to people unfamiliar with the format. And there would be accessibility consequences, FWIW.
Consider the fate of the traditional double-underline advertising link. It became a thing, easily understood, but downward pressure on the quality of those links meant that public trust in it was slowly poisoned.
That might make sense if all BB posts had to be read in order, but people can, and do, come to them selectively and out of order. So your serial disclosure approach doesn’t work.
And, don’t be surprised by this, it is also an approach to disclosure specifically pointed out by the FTC .com Disclosures Guidelines as being insufficient for just that reasoning.
They give the example of a disclosure tweet getting separated in the twitter feed from a later claim, which has lost any reasonable connection to the disclosure.
If a disclosure is in a place consumers aren’t reasonably likely to notice it on any given post that is a paid endorsement or advertisement then it isn’t a good disclosure - and I say that as a “human being” and a consumer.
Well, I don’t know how many people participate in user-started threads, as I don’t participate in many. That, plus the somewhat frosty reception that @Skeptic has been met with on this holiday Monday might explain the lack of participation.
Hey, people know it, but do they know it. I mean, I’m guessing Cory personally makes close to six figures—if not more—from his Amazon links every year. Do people know this? If they did, and they were made aware of how many revenue-generating links there really are, would their perceptions change? Would they actually know things in a different way than they knew them before? I suspect they would.
Have the number of affiliate links, or proportion of posts containing them, changed over the years? I don’t know, but I suspect that you guys are sitting on a lot of interesting data that could be mined for an interesting post on affiliate marketing and revenue.
When it comes to your question about what has changed, I suspect a lot of things have. When you first started using affiliate links I don’t think many people knew how they worked, or even what they were, and I’m not sure that you should be grandfathered in to a non-disclosure regime simply because you started using them at a time when your audience was smaller and not many of your current readers knew what they were.
I also don’t know if the affiliate program always covered purchases other than those linked to. I’m not sure if they always had a volume-based escalator system. I’m not sure if it was always such a lucrative prospect. And I do think that it’s only recently that people are becoming more aware of how significant these programs can be.
Well, you could argue that the FTC regulations simply don’t apply because you’re an established and professional review site (which would be a stretch, especially for some of your contributors), but if the FTC regulations do apply I think it’s pretty clear that the disclosures have to be proximate and nut buried and the bottom of a very long page or in a legalese page.
Without commenting on whether the FTC’s possible inability and/or reluctance to enforce these regulations is a good reason to ignore them, I will say that Amazon has dropped some affiliates who have failed to prominently disclose the promotional/financial aspects of their links.
Well, part of the problem seems evident in this thread, as BB’s publisher seems a little fuzzy on just how the affiliate program works and what it covers (and I suspect, from your blurb on tea lights, that you may be as well).
Pop-up text that appears when you hover over an affiliate link would probably do the trick (and also appear in links that you can see on the home page). Or a subheading/byline after the title that denotes the use of affiliate links.
Not really an argument in favor of non-disclosure, or the not very helpful serial disclosure. Nor an argument that validates hiding a global affiliates link disclosure in the privacy policy. It would, however, explain why you were the one to invoke the word “ethics” in the discussion not me - so it seems likely that your Gamergate posts would be all of those with the word “ethics” in them. Color me not impressed.
Seems like it might be time for a new Godwin’s Law, one that applies to people who invoke Gamergate as a non-sequitur to devolve the conversation.
I think what @beschizza was getting at is that it implies a sort of extreme, tedious pedantry.
Affiliate links is how things have worked here for well on a decade. It is normal and expected. Why would it be any different today? If you have a problem with affiliate links, you are on the wrong site.
