This discussion is quite long, but for me it's really simple:
You don't say your site is ad-free if you get paid for links. Especially inside the donations pitch.
I don't care if you take donations, have a paywall, or sell advertisements (the ballet does all three, and that's awesome). Just be honest.
A maxim I use when trying to establish honesty: If you write a sentence that a substantial number of readers are misinterpreting, it's usually fair to call it an inaccurate sentence. If it's knowingly left there, it's usually fair to call it dishonest. Exceptions would include technically difficult material.
Edit: In this case, both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads. I haven't polled her general readership, but that's a reasonable proxy for how the terms "ad-free" and "affiliate links" are interpreted.
There's more than honesty at stake here... I'm pretty sure you could run into problems with the FTC (in the USA) if you disregard this principle. See for example http://bvyer.net/info/conduct. Other countries might have similar rules.
"both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads"
I believe that the reason that Amazon does this (I have an account) was intended to get around the sales tax issue by calling the payments for advertising as opposed to something that a State could take as "reseller" and translate to a presence and have a stronger leg for state sales tax from Amazon (not relevant given the recent changes but it was back when this practice started).
The difference is between solicited and unsolicited paid promotions. Popova thinks there's an obvious difference which goes without saying. Bleymaier thinks there's no difference and therefore attacked Popova for being morally bankrupt.
I would side more with Popova here regarding the aff links. She seems to having read hundreds and hundreds of books, and then she picks those which she found interesting and blog about them.
But what I see a bigger problem is that her asking for donation is presented to the reader as something which keeps the site ad-free, while it seems to be just another revenue stream.
The deception seems not about how to classify affiliate links, but rather deliberately leading the reader to infer that the blog's only income source is donations
Maybe so. It all boils down to recommendation versus promotion. I hate ads yet I'm totally comfortable with affiliate links on blog, so I consider her site to be ad-free.
Oddly, I don't like affiliate links in forums like HN.
It all boils down to recommendation versus promotion
No, I think that's a sidetrack. The issue, at least how I read it, is saying to the dear reader "please donate as that's my only income source"* when it's not true. It's deliberately deceptive.
What's odd is that there's nothing wrong, that I can see, with just being upfront about affiliate links - "Hey, want to support this blog? I get a small amount of money from any purchases made by clicking on the amazon links"
* Yes, I realise that's not the words she's using, but it sure is the message that's conveyed
I feel the same as grandparent, but it's a blurry line. Ideally, promoted ads should be recommendations. Buy more than just reach to a demo, instead ensure a qualified voice authentically highlights your benefits - more akin to social recommendations from friends than banner ads.
This is rarely attempted in a world of publications that depend on ad volume and outsourced ad buyer supply, but examples exist. The webcomic Penny Arcade recently ran a Kickstarter to achieve freedom from ads, but found itself answering questions like "What if I love ads?" (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2012/07/20/what-if-i-love-ads) because they'd built a reputation of only advertising products they would feel comfortable endorsing even without an adbuy (can't find a direct link to when they talk about this, but it's out there somewhere).
I am surprised that the FTC's position on this issue is a footnote of the original article and the HN discussion.
From FTC Assistant Deputy Rich Cleland: "a disclosure must be made when a blogger is recommending something and using an affiliate link. He went on to say that “the recommendation triggers the disclosure requirement.”(1)
There is no wiggle room here.
Maria Popova needs to disclose the relationship with her advertisers (Amazon).
The FTC has a gargantuan job ahead of them w/regard to enforcement, but that's no excuse especially given the content that Popova writes about.
I think the correct way to approach this is to contact the NY State Attorney General's Office and ask them to investigate possible fraud that violates FTC guidelines.
Affiliate links are absolutely a form of advertising. It's called CPA (cost per action), and its one of the two major categories of performance advertising. The other category of performance advertising is CPC (cost per click), which is most common in search advertising but is also used by Google for their Adwords on-page ads. Banner ads are often sold as CPM (cost per thousand), which is often called brand advertising as opposed to performance.
Setting aside semantics, ad-free publications are expected to be influence-free. The minute a publication starts to optimize their affiliate links, they are allowing their advertising revenue to influence their publication.
Finally, as another poster has pointed out: using affiliate links is not her mistake. Her mistake is claiming to be ad-free when she is not. And claiming to be supported solely by donations, when she is not.
Both of these mistakes are fraud according to the FTC and also under California law (which applies to her readers in California). She is most exposed to a class-action lawsuit from a lawsuit mill. Literally, there are law firms whose main line menu says "press 4 if you have received a class-action lawsuit from us".
Changing the wording in response to a complaint, then changing it back after creating an LLC will be the crucial step that the law firm uses to pursue the case against her personally and against the LLC.
So she has a site full of affiliate links because (holy crap) she wants to make some cash. Is OP mad about this? If so, meh, get a life.
So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living.
So she asks for donations in order to keep ads off her site while at the same time employing affiliate links. I missed the part where there is a law about having multiple sources of income, and so did the company you most likely work for. Would you be happier if she put this entire thing behind a paywall?
I really don't understand the logic behind the critique. She provides a service, if you like the service, you get to consume it completely without payment. Now you're bitching because you've found out that she has found a way to continue to offer this service to you for free?
The beauty about "reviews" is that if you don't like them - for whatever reason - you stop listening. It's irrelevant whether the person is paid or not for a favourable review if you actually like the end product and agree with the review!
The entire idea of "immorality of paid reviews" screams of teenage "your band sold out because lots of people like you".
Affiliate links are advertisements, the best kind, they have a call to action "buy this" and a built in tracking mechanism. When you watch CSI on television and they drink pepsi (not coke, not generic cola) that creates a link in your brain that the 'cool kids' on CSI drink pepsi, and a billion studies have shown that this influences peoples choice when they are sitting in the soda aisle at the store buying soft drinks.
She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it.
That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are more likely to write the truth as they see it.
She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time.
One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away.
This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries.
If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.
Your comment is quite possibly the biggest, most sensationalist jump in logic I have seen on this website. So, because she includes affiliate links in her website (which would have probably linked to Amazon or another seller anyway) she is on a downward spiral to an inevitable and shameful collapse of her readership akin to a truck driver abusing cocaine? What?
You say her story is sad. I'd say your view on life, thinking anyone who neglects to adhere to your strict standards of supplementing income is doing so out of bad faith and a loss of integrity, is the real sad story.
Perhaps we've heard a different number of stories. Have you ever watched a 'monster of the week' type television show in its third, fourth, maybe fifth season? Come to the realization that the plot points, the progression, all sketch a common framework from beginning to end?
I've known a lot of people in my life, I have watched a number of careers start, peak, and end. After a while you recognize them when you see them. Did you read any of the Jason Leher coverage? Did you follow the follies of Shirley Hornstein?
The common thread is that someone lowers the integrity cut-off bar on their own behavior for what seem to be perfectly justifiable reasons, and it works out better than they anticipated. That knowledge eats that them until they do it again, and again, and again.
I observed Maria Popova's story, from the perspective of ever decreasing levels of integrity, reads just like that. I don't know how her story will end up of course, sometimes people pull out of it and get themselves back into the right as it were.
I'm curious why you consider that observation sensationalist. Is it because I asserted it is widely applicable across a variety of people and situations, or something else? Is it sensationalist to say that a dropped apple falls because of gravity and that same principle keeps the moon in orbit?
The problem with your prediction is that you assume what she is doing is lowering her integrity, and the criteria you are using to determine this is entirely your own.
Seriously? Comparing the author of a blog who solicits donations as well as uses affiliate links to someone who falsified their employment history and photoshopped their head into pictures with celebrities? And then you extrapolate those few datapoints you have to represent everyone who has ever "lowered" (by your standards, of course) their integrity?
> I'm curious why you consider that observation sensationalist.
Comparing a blog author using affiliate links to a truck driver abusing drugs or an athlete using steroids is pretty sensationalist. Those examples bring a bunch of extra baggage: a truck driver abusing cocaine is driving impaired and doing something incredibly illegal.
"The problem with your prediction is that you assume what she is doing is lowering her integrity, and the criteria you are using to determine this is entirely your own."
I'm going to assume you actually read the article. In that article Ms. Propova espouses to The Guardian the need for journalistic independence, she labels her site 'advertising free" and she uses ads in the form of referral links to support her web site.
When presented with the difference between what she was saying and what she was doing, she dissembles and rationalizes affiliate links as not being advertising. She knows that isn't true, she ran affiliate link farms before she ran this blog [1].
So she is lying. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't intentionally being a swindler (she may be but this article doesn't provide enough evidence to support that) and by that reasoning I interpreted her actions which were at a lower standard of integrity than her words to The Guardian as 'lowering her integrity.'
You under sell the reality with this comment:
"Comparing the author of a blog who solicits donations as well as uses affiliate links to someone who falsified their employment history and photoshopped their head into pictures with celebrities?"
The integrity issue isn't with here using affiliate links and soliciting donations here, the integrity issue is attempting to create a perception through lying to benefit herself financially. Had she written on her blog, "This blog is funded by donations and from what ever I make from the affiliate links" or had she written "Note that when you buy an item from amazon by clicking the links here it helps to support my blog, I am also supported by generous donations from people like you." Or something similar, that would be clear. But it would also result in fewer donations which would cut into her income stream. She seems to have demonstrated that with the whole banner-free / non-ads switcheroo and back again. The integrity issue is that she is lying to get more money.
And what did Shirly Hornstein do? She lied about who she knew or who she could make introductions to. Why? Because people who believed that lie did things for her, and helped support her in a lifestyle she believed she deserved. Back before Shirly was photoshopping herself into candid snapshots she was just telling a few white lies to get past the barriers. If you compared her actions then, with Ms. Popova you would be hard pressed to see any difference in the 'level' of integrity loss.
And that was my point, it starts small, it gets out of hand, and it ruins people. Did you watch the interview Lance Armstrong did with Barbara Walters? Did you see why he cheated? How he rationalized his need to "get healthy" and how "others were doing it."
Did you not hear the same plot points in his story? Did you not see his own self belief that it all started out so innocently? Did you listen to any of the testimony on the steroids scandal before Congress? Story after story after story, "It was a small thing" followed by "just one more time" followed by "I had to keep up" followed by "it ruined my life."
Then there was this point:
"Comparing a blog author using affiliate links to a truck driver abusing drugs or an athlete using steroids is pretty sensationalist."
I'm not sure we'll agree here but that is ok, I see the same story in all of them, whether or not you read about it or hear about it depends on your relationship to the people in the story and their relative visibility, but that doesn't make it a different story. Lots of people cheat on their spouses because they are enthralled by an engaging and attractive person, happens all the time, and it happened to General Petraeous. The latter was a "big scandal" because he was the Directory of the CIA, but the story? He let his dick call the shots. That isn't sensationalism, its just sad.
"a truck driver abusing cocaine is driving impaired and doing something incredibly illegal."
I take if you've never used cocaine, it doesn't impair you like alcohol or marijuana might. When I was going to school it was a problem on a par with illicit ADHD drugs today and for much the same reason. I knew several people who used it regularly to keep their energy level up and their concentration sharp, unless you knew they were using you would just think they were smart and quick witted with boundless energy. These days [2] Truck drivers would probably stick with Red Bull or over the counter drugs to avoid tripping up on a drug test.
[2] "In the 1980s the administration of President Ronald Reagan proposed to put an end to drug abuse in the trucking industry by means of the then-recently developed technique of urinalysis, with his signing of Executive Order 12564, requiring regular random drug testing of all truck drivers nationwide, as well as employees of other DOT-regulated industries specified in the order, though considerations had to be made concerning the effects of an excessively rapid implementation of the measure." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_driver#Truck_driver_probl...
She bemoans advertiser funded journalism yet makes money from advertisements. She's created an incentive for herself to perform a certain way, and yet writes about the dangers of just such an incentive.
The disagreement is over the definition of "advertisement". Is creating a link to something "advertising" it? If the words were the same, but not hypertext, is it still advertising?
It was kind of funny how most of the page is linked, it's almost hard not to click through to the page selling the book.
For me, linking or "making available" isn't advertising. An advertisement needs to contain content written by an advertiser. Is reviewing a book the same as advertising it?
Arguing over the terms is avoiding the crux of the issue.
Because (much of) the income for the site came from affiliate links, her revenue was closely tied to what she wrote. And not simply in the "I have to write interesting/helpful things to maintain my readership", but in the "Posting a review of a good book will be financially more beneficial to me than posting a review of bad book".
Having those sort of external influences makes it harder to maintain your journalistic integrity. You (are tempted to) get distracted from "which story is best for my readers" to "which story will generate the most income".
Having those (undisclosed) external influences, while also being extremely vocal about how external financial motivations are bad for journalism, is hypocritical.
Reviewing a book is not necessarily the same as advertising it, but most reviews do not directly enable purchase of the products they review.
If a reviewer is paid by the distributor of the books or products they review and they directly contribute to the sale of the book, they're marketing the book.
That's not necessarily hypocritical. You can dislike something that you are benefiting from.
You can also employ a version of selling that is consumer focused rather than business focused; looking at the situation, I believe this is what she is doing.
Most of us may see affiliate links and ads as being one in the same, but I don't think they are, and reading into her views I think she has done a good job of explaining the difference.
It is 100% not about the fact that she makes money. It's about the fact that she is soliciting people to donate under the false guise that doing so is what is keeping her 'in business'.
It's also important to note that if you blanket your site with affiliate links you ARE more likely to favorably review high % revenue items for example. Making your opinion possibly influenced by factors that your readers are not aware of.
These two factors are enough for me to consider her being pretty 'holier than though' in a lot of her statements.
> So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living.
I would disagree. The presence of the affiliate links within the articles effectively converts each article into an "advertisement". What is being advertised are the embedded affiliate links.
In this way there is created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that likely has a choice effect on what postings are written (advertisements) because there is an incentive to only write postings that will have the largest affiliate click through.
No, the problem is that her site is funded by donations and affiliate links. I'd venture to guess her affiliate links provide most of her income. That's fine. That's better than fine, that's proof that independent publishers and curators can make a living for themselves.
The problem is that while taking that additional form of income (which until last week was NOT disclosed on her page -- but in fairness was obvious to anyone with half a brain and any understanding about how this stuff works -- hint, just look for the affiliate code at the end of her Amazon links), Maria has consistently gone on record about the evils of advertising and sponsored content.
At the very least, it's hypocritical because affiliate links are in some sense, a form of advertising (at least when undisclosed). She says that she would never recommend or link to something she doesn't actually believe in -- and I believe her -- but without the disclosure (a disclosure the FTC actually requires), it raises questions of improprieties. By NOT being transparent as virtually every other person who does what she does is (look at John Gruber, Marco Arment, Merlin Mann, Jason Kottke and the many, many, many others who came before her who have always made it clear that they get a kickback from Amazon affiliate links), she at the very least loses the right to be as judgmental as she is about how other writers make money, as well as the state of advertising in general.
Then there is the unspoken issue, which was the fact that it was discovered back in November that she had maintained a number of spammy (pure, straight-up spam, no ifs ands or buts) affiliate link sites[1] until it was figured out and pointed out by another blogger. Then, magically, the sites disappeared and she made no public comment about it[2]. In light of that, it looks like a pattern.
And that pattern, honestly, wouldn't even be an issue for MOST people were it not for the whole attitude of "advertising is teh evil" that she has about other writers and other sites.
Then, of course, the other unspoken part is that there is a certain level of schadenfreude for people that are still annoyed over the whole Curator's Code bullshit that happened last year. And I'll be honest -- I made fun of her (and the Curator's Code) endlessly. It was a stupid, self-important, insipid and ill-thought out idea. Maria didn't invent the idea of a link blog and Maria doesn't get to dictate how and in what matter people hat-tip, link back or give a virtual hand-job to other "curators."
To be clear -- I'm not condemning her for any way she wants to make money -- I hope she makes $1 million a year off her site, if she does she deserves it -- but I do understand why for some people, it smells bad when someone who is vocally against traditional advertising and sponsored advertising is at the same time making significant money from affiliate links.
It isn't about "your band sold out because people like you" - it's more "you condemned other bands for signing to big labels while secretly taking big label money on the sly."
My personal feeling: This is unimportant drama that won't matter to the people that visit Brainpickings, like Maria and her work and click on her links. It also won't matter to the editors that commission her work for The Atlantic or the New York Times or whoever.
It matters to a small group of pedants who take Poynter's rules of "ethics" as gospel (don't make me laugh) and to a subset of the blogging community who enjoys needling people who they feel have unfairly condemned them in the past.
I guess it also appeals to people like myself who enjoy the melodrama and entertainment this episode provides, as it pulls us out of the daily ennui that is tech news the third week of February.
I think it has more to do with influence. Is her choice of topic influenced by her affiliate links? Would she write about a topic if there were no affiliate links to be had. Is her topic influenced by the reward of the affiliate link, would she chose a pricier product to link to over a cheaper link.
The OP is upset because they believe Maria Popova is being influenced and is not being open and honest about how she is being influenced.
The accusation is that the site is recommending things that are likely to sell (are already selling to people who click one affiliate link), not things that are good, all the while lying (to themselves?) that "these are things we'd recommend anyway!" If I were a reader, I'd be angry at being lied to in this way.
OP is mad that Popova is claiming to be ad-free when they believe affiliate links constitute ads. I think it's reasonable to disagree on that point, but that's not what you spent your rant doing.
You honestly don't get it? You don't see the hypocrisy in this behaviour? You don't see how people who felt the site truly was supported solely by donations and who gave because of that might feel mislead?
The issue isn't she makes n amount of money. The issue is what she is saying to her readers isn't actually true.
> Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price.
Technology blogs with affiliate links and/or adsense are known to have much lower conversion rates than average because tech savvy people tend to be more blind to ads (and many even use adblockers), and these users are typically aware that these programs exist.
I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links, and I can't remember the last time I clicked on an ad on Google or elsewhere.
"I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links"
Do you do this because you are curious, or because you don't want to click the link if it is an affiliate link? If the latter is the case, it seems strange you would not want to support the tech blogs you read, at no extra cost to yourself, if you already intend to purchase the item linked.
I think issue here is if you see an affiliate link, you start to question whether the author is heartily suggesting something because he genuinely likes it and wants to recommend it to you or he's just a bored blogger posting a new link on a new day, because that is what he does. On a side note, it seems to me that the author-reader trust is arguably preserved if the author of the articles does not choose what ads appear on his site because it absolves him of the cloud of doubt that he might have ulterior motives.
Maybe a lot of the folks doing this are the ones that used to see ads before they started using Adblock, and they still have a memory of ads leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Of course all of this is questioning the model of an ad-supported Internet. This is something I'm still conflicted about -- I really don't want to see ads on Google et al., I mean I really don't, I really wish I could give Google $50/month and tell them hey just focus on the experience, don't show me ads, and I'll be your customer. I'd do this for a whole array of sites on which I begrudgingly use Adblock and other extensions that prevent affiliate links from appearing.
I agree about the motivation aspect - should I write a glowing review of a book that I didn't like to generate more clicks? Even if I write honestly, will it be perceived as disingenuous because of affiliate links?
I turned on the affiliates links as an experiment and haven't changed my style - though I always try to find at least something positive about a book. I'll probably revisit it in the future and decide if the (thus far) meager income is worth dealing with the reader-trust issues.
I agree, I don't have a problem with affiliate ads but if the article in question is a gushingly positive review without any negatives mentioned and they are using an affiliate link then I tend to question the motivation behind writing it. I also will then look for a review that doesn't contain an affiliate id or one that covers the pros and cons giving a full review instead of an advertisement disguised as a review.
I tend to have a reflex to avoid affiliate links, if only because I feel like they lead to content generated only to contain affiliate links.
(I can recall a few death-of-blog posts where the author didn't say as much, but the content of the post made it clear enough that they had decided they better make some money if they are going to continue writing the blog and apparently the link loaded final post failed to make money)
I agree with this. Yes, if a link includes an affiliate code, you might want to be more skeptical of a recommendation.
But if, after due diligence, you decide to purchase the item, you'll pay the same amount either way. The only question is whether you want some of the purchase amount to be shared with the blogger or whether you want to make sure that Amazon won't have to share any of it.
That's only true if Amazon chooses not to funnel money that would normally be paid out in affiliate commissions into another advertising channel. Amazon's affiliate program isn't operated out of a sense of altruism.
"Amazon's affiliate program isn't operated out of a sense of altruism."
Oh I know it is. The blog in question is essentially one giant Amazon ad pitch (I have never seen that many affiliate links on one page). However if the argument is "well the person just wanted to review the book anyways, and why not them get the money instead of it padding Bezo's pockets", the position falls apart: If they aren't being incentivized by the affiliate links, then Amazon might as well save that money.
But of course we all know that such blogs are heavily incentivized by such affiliate commissions. When Atwood decides to pitch a particular product that what do you know he can cover with an affiliate link...it isn't accidental.
It's not that there's no extra cost to yourself, it's more that you are missing out - you could get the very same item through your own affiliate scheme, thus contributing to your own bottom line (read - paying less for the item).
"you could get the very same item through your own affiliate scheme"
FYI. The Amazon affiliate program does not allow you to purchase items via your own referrals. To do so is a contract violation and they will terminate your affiliate account.
Thanks for the links, including a response at the end of the first link.
From the second link:
> To a certain extent, this is a female thing: positive happy
> bloggers tend to be female, as do their readers.*
> ...
> *Update: This sentence has not gone down well in the Twittersphere.
I, for one, would love to read a serious and rigorous research paper (if one's been done?) on the differences between sites mostly populated by females (Etsy, Pinterest, etc. -- to the tune of 80+%, I've heard) vs. ones populated by males (Slashdot, Digg, etc.) -- and how different monetization methods work out for each.
Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...
I wonder if there would have been the same reaction had Salmon instead written his observation with leftish-academic word choice:
To a certain extent, this is a gendered phenomenon: positive happy bloggers are disproportionately female, as are their readers.
Same idea – which may or may not be true, but it seems plausible enough to entertain for the purposes of casual opinionated discussion. The rephrasing gives it more intellectual and euphemistic padding, as a defense against knee-jerk outrage.
I was reading along, thinking 'this guy seems to have his head on fairly straight' - an even-handed evaluation of the situation. When I read what I quoted above I experienced (maybe more clearly than I ever have before) the classic 'wait, wut? [sic]'. The first thing that came to mind:
However, I can tell you that your $1M in affiliate revenue on 1.2M UV for a literary blog is way off. Your assumption of 10% conversion is off by at least an order of magnitude.
The more likely rate is probably less than 1%. This would bring the total amount to around $100K in your calculation.
I do (much lower scale) affiliate links and book reviews, mostly for the data, rather than the money. But my conversion rate is something like 23%. With a good niche and qualified traffic (eg most traffic coming from people genuinely linking to you because the content is awesome and relevant) 10% is not impossible.
Your conversion rate from unique visitors to sales is 23%? What type of traffic are you talking about? That's absurdly high and would still be high for a site that directly sells something, let alone a site that has a link to a book.
Well I meant both how much and what type (as in direct, referral, organic search engine, paid search engine, etc).
23% would be unbelievable for direct traffic like the blog in question has, but less so for search engine traffic (if you have links to what people were searching about they are many many times more likely to both click and convert than if they are just on their daily read through).
He/she could also have meant 23% conversion as reported through Amazon which means 23% of the people who clicked ended up purchasing, also a much more believable number.
Unless someone sees the exact numbers, or has a comparable web site, they have no idea what they really are. The author is building one assumption on top of the other, meaning each step off makes the end result even further from reality. I haven't touched Amazon's affiliate program in years, but from what I remember the % of sale was category based, and many items would pay out in the low single digits.
Web site owners soliciting donations while making money from affiliate links, not unusual. Owners making money from affiliate links while not disclosing them, even more common. Journalists attacking bias while making money and not disclosing it, unusual and certainly worth investigating.
It's a little more subtle than this I think: he's arguing that across a year maybe 1/10th of the 1.2m monthly unique visitors will buy something. So overall conversion is 1/(10*12) or roughly 1%. Would love to hear from someone who runs a literary b,log though and has better figures.
I've been following this story, as my co-founder and I are in the midst of an advertising-policy debate.
I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. She may have avoided that in order to hold the "ad-free" moral high ground.
The FTC guidelines on this are an interesting read if you make endorsements, even affiliate links, on your site. I'll track it down.
> You must, however, clearly state the following on your site: “[Insert your name]
> is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate
> advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising
> fees by advertising and linking to [insert the applicable site name (
> amazon.com, amazonsupply.com, or myhabit.com)].”
>I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links.
A visit to her site reveals that she has corrected that defect. Down at the bottom, we now see:
Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means
for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human
terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link
on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support
Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain
the site, and is very much appreciated.
That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction
of what it takes to maintain the site[...]
It implies that only a small amount of the costs to maintain the site are paid for by affiliate link earnings, but technically something like 200/1 is also a "fraction".
The active claim that there wasn't advertising is what bugs me in this case, more than the links not being labeled. I don't really mind if people include some affiliate links if they aren't particularly spammy (i.e. the content doesn't seem to be written solely as affiliate-link bait), but then if they do so, I wouldn't expect them to solicit donations while claiming to be ad-free.
I've read the books she recommends on her website and they are usually thoughtful pieces of writing.
I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. I believe she's referring to how she discovered them and not the reason she recommends them. Of course I am giving her the benefit of the doubt because the quality of the content on her site is generally high.
She serves her niche of intellectuals fairly well and I think spamming with lower quality content for the sake of making money would be noticed quickly by them. The donations on top of the affiliate links seems a bit much, but I think people might still donate and or purchase in order to show support for her work.
> I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon.
I think it's clear that she's deliberately and forcefully fishing for clicks on Amazon affiliate link hits. I mean, just take a look at the number of large images (every one of them being affiliate links), one after another, encompassing probably 6-page'fuls at times (and I'm on a 1080p res.). I'm a person who's usually very well aware of what is an affiliate link or not... and yet I found myself strongly wanting to click the images. I don't buy it for a single second that Popova is not exactly aware of what she is doing. Her repeated requests for donations (after every post, in which she stresses that this is a site that doesn't have advertisements) leave no room for doubt -- I strongly believe she is disrespecting the user in a very fundamental way by misleading them like this and playing them on.
As I write this, there are over 40 Amazon affiliate links on her homepage alone. And as you correctly point out, they're prominently placed (esp. using images) to achieve maximum click-through.
She says the affiliate revenue she's downplaying is way, way less than what the article assumes. Well, if I were her I'd:
1) disclose all my Amazon revenue and
2) donate it every month to someplace awesome
That'd probably get her more monthly subscribers, earn her more money, and silence the haters. Unfortunately her dissembling on this issue so far sort of edges me into the latter category.
There are also links for every book to find it in your local public library. If you want to pay for the book the site where you found it gets a small cut, but the site also makes it easy for you to get the book for free.
I would change the wording on the tip jar, but if her blog really is generating a lot of book sales it's not unreasonable for her to see some revenue.
In particular, she states, "Regarding his Tumblr article – first of all, those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I’d be delighted. Delighted!"
Assuming literal honesty, "if 1/10 of that, i'd be thrilled!" does suggest that the actual figure is at least 1/20th of whatever "that" was (1.2m/yr?) (but could still be lower).
This post seems too dramatic - it looks like she is simply admitting to learning from what her readers read. If you build an audience writing a certain way, it's likely that your readers also have something of value to contribute and inspecting what they read and in turn offering it to other readers on your website is clever, if anything.
Also, it's just not nice to publish personal email communication. Just bring it up with her over a coffee or something.
I don't think it's particularly dramatic -- many of us find blogs in general to have more moral ambiguity/flexibility, and less of a understanding of the power of persuasion. This is an absolutely rampant issue (did Marco or Atwood recommend that hard drive or coffee carafe because it's the best...or because it's one that they could post an affiliate link to? What inspired that post?)
Funny thing is: she could make more money by telling people she gets support from the links. She just needs to spin it correctly.People want to buy these books, knowing it is helping her would only make them want to buy them more.
I worked at a non-profit tech company that did a campaign where we got people to use our affiliate code to make purchases on Amazon. People liked doing it, it made them feel good. It also gave them excuse to feel good about going on a buying spree on Amazon.
I bet she could significantly increase revenue buy having a button under each book she links to that said, "Help keep this site going, buy this book".
And it would also sidestep this whole controversy.
> There are typically 3 articles published per day, and most pages have more than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions let's assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M impressions per year.
It's cute that the author thinks number of links = "impressions" and that it has some sort of effect on the number of sales. In reality it's mostly the same people viewing the site every day and very few will end up buying a book, even fewer from the affiliate link (there appears to also always be a link for finding it in your local public library). You could put 100 links in a post and have no more sales than with 1, what matters is if your readers find the book interesting enough to want to pay to read it.
2) Author has included a massive wall of text with little structure. No headings or sections. Makes it harder to get through it.
3) Most important of all, the author does not provide a clear link to the site of the person he is criticizing. This makes it harder for third parties (us) to evaluate his claims.
It looks she now has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says they participate in the Amazon Affiliate program which allows website owners the ability to earn a commission for products that are linked to.
Sure, but it's located below the donation section, which still claims to be ad free. And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. She can justify it however she wants, but at the end of the day, she's misleading readers (IMO).
> And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures.
Those "pretty pictures" are often illustrations from the work shown to assist in the review. That's quite the undertone you're wringing out of her rather mundane actions.
I don't think you understand - the images (at least the ones that got through my adblockers) are hosted on her website. Which is exactly what is needed to illustrated the work in the review. The part that isn't necessary for reviewing is to make the images clickable and link them to the product at amazon. If every image is clickable, why not the entire text of the review too?
I think it is a big stretch to assume that anyone who clicks an illustration from a book in a review wants to purchase the book. By making so much of the screen space clickable like that she makes it quite easy for an accidental click to end up "capturing" the affiliate revenue from any amazon purchases that user makes in the next 10 hours (or whatever the amazon affiliate cookie time-out is).
Attaching affiliate links to those images is not "mundane". It effectively them into banner ads. She's covering her site in click targets that make her money and then claiming to be ad-free on the same page.
It really is, considering the number of people who use Amazon's affiliate service. She's not sneaking in links or using a URL shortener or something. She's taking a part of her review that might entice people to buy the book— the illustrations— and adding an affiliate link to them. Pretty mundane. Personally, it just hasn't crossed that line into "shady behavior used by spammers."
"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)."
How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?
Yes, absolutely. At one point I made about $100 through amazon affiliates ( a link on Slashdot, actually, quite possibly the only time social media has made me money).
What happened was, I linked to a book on programming that was relevant, and being broke at the time, put it as an affiliate link.
Someone looked at the book, and went on to buy $2300 or so of camera gear. I got the 4% commission on the whole bundle. You get to see exactly what people purchased (though not, of course, individually, but "X of Y")
It's very interesting, if you've never worked with Amazon Affiliates, it's extremely rich data they provide.
Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.
Yeah, I've even seen pop-unders on shady sites whose entire purpose seems to be to set Amazon affiliate cookies in the hope of making money off unrelated Amazon purchases.
That's standard behavior in most affiliate programs, not just Amazons. They just place a sitewide cookie (or less typically, a session variable) with the affiliate's ID in it, as you guessed. It's usually not tied to the purchase of any one particular item, which is what the quote is referring to.
I'm not sure what her support page used to say, but it seems perfectly clear at present. In the same sentence she both says she wants to keep the site ad-free AND confirms that one of the way she does this is through affiliate links:
"Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price."
Does the math in the post seem plausible to anyone who uses affiliate links? A .001 click-through rate to Amazon seems plausible, but unless I'm mistaken the author of the post is using that a conversion percentage (i.e. a click-through + purchase), which seems way too high to me, by an order of magnitude or more.
Does anyone have solid numbers for click-through to purchase rates of affiliate links?
Capitalism rewards skilful deception. Yes, she does unethically, but she is rewarded by the system! And read her, she is doing a good job for her readers.
Ask yourself - are Google and Yahoo and Yandex doing all right by placing everyone into their individual search bubbles to extract more ad money from AdSense? Probably not.
Competitor of hers maybe? Don't totally disagree but the implication at the end this woman may be engaging in tax irregularities? - that's unfounded and a bit slanderous.
Agree though - aff links are ads. You shouldn't say 'ad-free'.
Usually, when referring to someone in print, we use their last name. Out of courtesy. So it's "Popova" not "Maria."
Also, Bleymaier's estimates on donation and affiliate income are just ludicrous. 50k-100k/year in donations from 1.2 million visitors/month? Yeah, right. :) They take away from the original point he was trying to make, which he could have made without making numbers up out of thin air.
I don't think anyone is saying that trying to make money is wrong. It is very disturbing (to me at least) to say that you're funded only by donations while you're embedding affiliate links. People should have the utmost respect for their audience and the person in question has failed there.
I think that this consistent misunderstanding that she is "only trying to make money" is itself significantly more worrisome than her specific case.
I think it speaks very poorly of our profession that so many HN readers have a really hard time grasping the concepts involved with this story. It makes me question if this is simply an area of ethics that most tech-heads aren't very experienced with or if it is something more insidious, more along the lines of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
It is scamming, at least in my book. Of course not the one you go to jail for but still scamming. What makes it even worse is the fact, that she talks about the opposite and judge people for doing the same what she did.
The author of this article came across as a major creep to me. They guy checks emails from 6 months ago and keeps going back to her blog to verify stuff....WTF? I'd be more concerned about this guy than her silly affiliate links.
Oh dear god. One more hypocrite makes illegitimate gains and has whistle blown by jealous, over-zealous loser who believes themselves to be the moral judge/jury/executioner of us all. Next
You don't say your site is ad-free if you get paid for links. Especially inside the donations pitch.
I don't care if you take donations, have a paywall, or sell advertisements (the ballet does all three, and that's awesome). Just be honest.
A maxim I use when trying to establish honesty: If you write a sentence that a substantial number of readers are misinterpreting, it's usually fair to call it an inaccurate sentence. If it's knowingly left there, it's usually fair to call it dishonest. Exceptions would include technically difficult material.
Edit: In this case, both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads. I haven't polled her general readership, but that's a reasonable proxy for how the terms "ad-free" and "affiliate links" are interpreted.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing