Inside Affiliate

Posts Tagged ‘myspace’

As more and more affiliates are trying to figure out how to monetize Twitter, one of the largest affiliate programs on earth has decided against it.  Amazon is refusing to pay affiliate commissions on clicks generated from Twitter, citing a clause in the TOS that states that the clicks have to be generated from “your site”.  Since Twitter is not your site, the clicks are invalid (at least according to Amazon).

This seems like an odd move to me, and it’’s an even odder move if it becomes a precedent for other websites that will no longer be accepted as legitimate traffic sources.  What does this mean for affiliates that use 3rd party adservers or tracking software so that all the clicks appear to come from a different site than their own?  Will Amazon only be allowing affiliates to place banners on their websites instead of the RSS methods that we have enjoyed up until this point?

I”m assuming that Amazon must have received a bunch of complaints about the links in Twitter as people were tricked into clicking by their “friends”.  This is not really any different then when CPA advertisers declared that they would not accept traffic from MySpace or Facebook messages, bulletins, updates, friend spamming, etc.  There were major lawsuits filed against several companies including Media Breakaway, parent company of affiliate.com.  I suppose it is best if Amazon pulls the plug now instead of waiting for things to get ugly and bringing out the lawyers.

So bottom line, if you have a nice auto blog setup with an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you better pull the Amazon links from it ASAP or you are just burning money.  As far as I know, you can still post eBay Partner Network links, RevTwt links, and CPA links.

It’’s not quite back-to-the-drawing-board yet, but it is definitely a sign of things to come.

In case you were considering using a Botnet or an army of outsourced data entry workers to farm Facebook and/or Myspace accounts, don’t do it.  Today Facebook sent a sturn message to spammers everywhere by winning an $873 million judgement against a user named Adam Guerbuez that sent 4 million spam messages promoting marijuana, male enhancement projects, and other junk offers.

It wasn’t that long ago that the legendary Sanford Wallace pulled a similar stunt on Myspace, illiciting a $230 million judgement against him.  That figure seemed ridiculously high at the time, but here we are not more than six months later with a judgement almost four times higher.

Let’s look at the risk vs. rewards here.  According to recent studies, spam isn’t as profitable as it was thought.  People have wised up.  After all, how many ads for “Viagkra” have you clicked on when they show up in your inbox?  As fun as it seems to have a network of computers working for you 24/7 to beat the system and fill up your bank account with untold riches is, it just doesn’t happen that way.  With a response rate of 0.00001%, it would be hard to turn any profits, let alone bank it big.

Then you have the Terms & Conditions to worry about.  There are all sorts of Terms & Conditions involved with internet marketing.  The Terms of the ad networks, the Terms of the search engines, the Terms of the social media networks, etc.  If you violate any of these Terms & Conditions, then you are not going to get paid, and you might risk legal action.

How would you like to wake up with an $873 million dollar debt hanging over your head?  I didn’t think so.  So play it safe, there is plenty of money to be made in the legitimate world of internet marketing.  Trust me.