Ethics in Affiliate Marketing
A few years ago I was advertising 12 month mobile phone contracts with 12 months free line rental. These worked by customers having to claim cashback by sending off vouchers to the company they took the contract through. If you didn’t exceed your monthly allowance and remembered to send all the cashback vouchers back in time, you effectively got a free phone and calls for an entire year. I had two of these contracts myself and took advantage of the massive savings. Each person I referred who then took a contract made me around £35. After a lucrative period advertising these deals, most of the companies offering these contracts went into administration. This meant that all of the people they owed money to lost out. I had no idea that these companies I was referring people to were in financial trouble, and if I had, I wouldn’t have been recommending anybody to take such a risky contract. This highlights some of the ethical dilemmas in affiliate marketing – there is a trade off between making a profit and providing a socially responsible service.
The particular thing which brought all of this to my attention recently was a personal experience with Virgin Media. Having had weeks of problems with their ‘customer service’, I logged into my DGM Pro account and noticed that I was an affiliate for them. Whilst I’m not actively advertising them, it did make me think. Do I really want to be promoting a merchant that I know have treated me in such a disgraceful way? Obviously the answer to this question is no. However much money their programme is paying, I would know that I’m signing people up to a company which I have firsthand experience of being terrible! Instead, I made a review of my experiences with Virgin Media letting people know how I had been treated. When I was looking to place a few affiliate adverts on the site, I realised I had another problem. How do I find merchants that I know treat their customers better than Virgin Media? I know that I don’t want to promote a company with a bad reputation, but without firsthand experience how do I know BT, Tiscali, O2 , Eclipse, Be Broadband etc.. are not even worse? I read a number of reviews online and after much deliberation I decided that it didn’t really matter who I advertised because they couldn’t be worse than Virgin (apart from TalkTalk apparently)!
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t advertise a particular company just because a couple of people have had bad experiences, as this would rule out almost all companies! However, there are a large number of sites which deliberately set out to mislead and trick potential customers into signing up to things just so they can get affiliate commission. This doesn’t seem morally acceptable to me.
