Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School assistant professor, well-known in the affiliate marketing circles for exposing parasitic affiliate behavior, click fraud and affiliate commission fraud, has posted an online advertising Bill of Rights proposition. He proposes 5 rights to help safeguard advertisers “from increasingly powerful ad networks”, from “wasting advertisers’ budgets, slowing transition to online formats, and reducing payments to online publishers”.
These are:
- An advertiser’s right to know where its ads are shown.
- An advertiser’s right to meaningful, itemized billing.
- An advertiser’s right to use its data as it sees fit.
- An advertiser’s right to enjoy the fruits of its advertising campaigns.
- An advertiser’s right to resolve disputes fairly and transparently.
All of the above have direct relation to the area of affiliate marketing, and you may review Ben’s thoughts behind each of these rights here: Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers. I, in my turn, second Ben’s proposition.
This is a good start. We need an affiliate marketing bill of rights as well, as has been addressed on ABestWeb among other places.
Affiliates have rights.
Merchants have rights.
Networks have rights.
All of the above have levels of accountability and responsibilities to make sure the system is working correctly as well.
We absolutely do need to have an Affiliate Marketing Bill of Rights too. We also need to have more transparency and support from affiliate networks.