General Discussion

How to Word Disclosures & Agreements to Meet FTC Rules

Over the past four days I have been receiving numerous emails from merchants and affiliates, asking how to word their texts to meet the new Federal Trade Commission rules for testimonials, reviews and endorsements. Affiliates wonder how to put together disclosures: As a publisher, is there generic type of blurb […]

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FTC Says the $11000 Fine "is Not True"

A tremendous tsunami of blog posts and articles has been raised by the recent Federal Trade Commission’s announcement of its guides for disclosing the sponsor-endorser element in testimonials and endorsements. At the time of this post there currently are 948 news articles and close to 4,000 blog posts on the

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Twitter Hashtags for Affiliate Tweets

So the Federal Trade Commission has announced the new rules for disclosing the sponsor-endorser relationships. This includes all affiliates that tweet, post, or publish any other online content that has affiliate links embedded in it (or content on which they earn money). But how do you squeeze an appropriate disclosure

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FTC Disclosure Rules & Affiliate Marketing Implications

—————————————————– Edit: 2 follow-up posts: (i) FTC Says the $11000 Fine “is Not True”, (ii) How to Word Disclosures & Agreements to Meet FTC Rules —————————————————– On 1 December 2009 the new Federal Trade Commission’s endorsements/testimonials rules are coming into force. I am referring to the “Guides Concerning the Use

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UK: Digital Advertising Overtakes All Other Channels

Today the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) revealed data from its bi-annual online advertising expenditure study. This report has been prepared in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC). The analysis of the first half of the year 2009 has shown that the Internet advertising spend in

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Forrester: US Affiliate Marketing Spend to Double in 5 Years

Three days ago Forrester Research, Inc. has published their “US Affiliate Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014” based on based in interviews of “vendor and user companies, including Commission Junction, Intuit, LinkShare, Pepperjam.com, Performance Marketing Alliance, Stateless Systems, ValueClick, and Vertive” [details]. In it Forrester forecasts the affiliate marketing industry to

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Free Affiliate Tracking Software

Many people come to my blog searching for “free affiliate tracking software”. There are a number of free (and inexpensive) scripts that merchants can install on their server to start an affiliate program. Here’s just a brief list: Affiliate Program Script Cosmic AffiliateClick SimpleAffiliate TigerTom’s Affiliate Program Software TWSC Affiliate

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Online Advertisers' Bill of Rights Proposed

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’

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