Full Disclosure Debate - Do Bloggers Need Regulated?
June 7th, 2007 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
There’s an ongoing debate over the idea that bloggers who place paid or affiliate links on their blogs should provide full disclosure to their readers about the “paid” endorsements.
Jeremy of Shoemoney.com [link provided freely] and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org [another link provided freely] have had some interesting exchanges on the topic, and because of their popularity many bloggers [just like me] have written about it and weighed in with their own opinions.
In the interest of providing full disclosure here, I’ve written about this several times already and my opinion has remained the same. I never provide links to–or promote in any way–any product or service on my blog or other sites that I wouldn’t suggest to my own Mother to purchase and use. If I don’t think they are an honest value for the price, I don’t mention them. My reason for this is simple, I understand that if I promote garbage just to make a few pennies in commission it will turn around and bite me on the ass down the road.
Blogs, and the web as a whole aren’t any different from the real world in this respect. We become known by the company we keep and companies that we do business with. If a blogger force-feeds garbage to his/her readers just to grab an extra dime, those readers will walk away with a foul taste in their mouths, never to return. It is that simple.
As I see it, publishing affiliate or paid links to a product or service that I believe in is nothing more than word-of-mouth advertising. I bet everybody who reads this has at some point told a friend or relative about some product or company they had a great experience with and encouraged that person to try it for themselves. That’s really all that I’m doing when I post an affiliate or paid link, which isn’t every link on my blog, many are posted freely too. I’m simply passing along to readers that I believe a product or service is worth checking out for themselves, and thanks to the power of web publishing I have the ability to send lots of potential customers to a vendor, so vendors are willing to provide a little compensation in return.
Even though I openly admit that some links on my blog earn me money, I don’t think any blogger should have to disclose that if they don’t want to. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the links are paid for or not, because it comes down to trust between the reader and the blogger.
Seriously, regardless of whether some links are paid for or not, if readers trust the information they get from the blogger and trust that he/she is sending them to resources of value, they’ll click the links and check them out.
But even if every link on my site was 100% money free, if readers don’t trust me they’re never going to click the links I publish anyway.
To me, full disclosure with bloggers is a silly notion. Reputation is what matters, and if you’re a stand-up blogger you’ll earn a good one and deserve any compensations for your time that you get. If you aren’t stand-up, or become greedy, the blogoshpere will drop-kick you to oblivion without hesitation.
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2 Responses to “Full Disclosure Debate - Do Bloggers Need Regulated?”
By Arron on Jun 8, 2007 | Reply
Just noticed that you followed this posting with one that appears to be a “sponsored” posting for some software.
I agree that the whole disclosure debacle seems silly, from strictly a reader’s point of view I expect every link on all web sites to be a promotion of some sort, and most likely there for compensations, but I’m curious why if you feel the way you say you do in this post, you placed a sponsor disclosure in the next posting?
Have you changed your position overnight?
By Scott on Jun 8, 2007 | Reply
Hi Arron, I certainly have not changed my position. If you’ve followed along or read through my older postings here you know that I’ve always held the same line on this, if a blogger can turn lots of people on to a service or product that he/she believes in, and a vendor is willing to offer some compensation for the recommendations, I think it is absolutely fair to do, and in-fact an added value for the blogger’s readers to be informed about quality products and services they may otherwise not know of.
I also don’t feel there’s any need for bloggers to “have to” disclose when a specific link is paid for or to an affiliate vendor, because whether or not readers will click links on a page ultimately depends on the trust they place in the blogger. If they don’t trust him/her to give them good information, they’re certainly not going to follow his/her lead or make purchases based on his/her suggestions.
That’s what makes this debate silly to me, because ultimately as I see it there isn’t really a problem that exists to be debated about.
However, and I don’t know if it’s because of all the noise this debate has made or not, there are some vendors (more and more actually) who now want disclosures made when promoting their products. That’s fine, and was the case with the software I mentioned today.
It doesn’t change my impression of the software at all, so I have no problem conforming in such cases.
Let me explain how today’s (and most) posting came about: there was an incident last night with my girl’s computer involving spyware, so I decided to post a little piece today reminding folks of the importance in having a quality protection program installed. As always, I planned to link to the program I like best in the posting.
I had some free time this morning, so went looking to see if the software I planned to link to, Spy Sweeper, offered any affiliate program that I could link through in the posting. To be clear, I’d have linked to it either way, but if I can earn a little revenue from suggesting something I believe in…why not?
In this case, the links actually aren’t affiliate links and I don’t earn a penny from any sales they generate. Instead of their affiliate program, I found that Webroot was offering to pay a flat-rate for honest reviews and mentions of their software. They didn’t require the posting be positive at all, the only requirement was that it contain the sponsored image link, and that’s why it’s there.