Affiliate Marketing 2013 Naughty and Nice List

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A couple of years ago right before Christmas wrote about Naughty Merchants [That] Deserve Lumps of Coal and in 2012 I did a full Affiliate Marketing Year in Review. This year I decided to combine the 2 with a year-end Naughty and Nice list. If you want to see who I think is naughty and nice throughout the year, be sure to follow me on Twitter because it seems to be what I tweet about the most!

The Naughty List

Google

Although I’m probably risking having my sites totally de-indexed for even saying this, Google tops my Naughty List this year due to their handling of the Google Affiliate Network shut down. When they announced in April that they would be closed by the end of July, they left not just affiliates but a lot of OPMs and merchants in the lurch. Almost immediately our reps were gone and there was no one around to ask questions to. Programs didn’t launch on new networks until the very last minute (and some at all).

Cellars Wine Club

Sometimes merchants accidentally screw over affiliates. Sometimes they do it intentionally and claim it was accidental. I’m not sure which was the case with Cellars Wine Club on Thanksgiving and continuing through to Cyber Monday, but you can read all about it in Eric Nagel’s post. This was a case of major changes being made to a site and the affiliate program commission structure during a holiday and peak shopping period. More importantly, all of their changes this year (getting rid of half of their products, changing their site, the coupon code issue, etc) have been done without any notice to affiliates outside of what gets generated from the network automatically.

Burt’s Bees

On November 27, Burt’s Bees notified its affiliates that the program would be closing within 7 days and all links should be removed by Cyber Monday. So we were notified the day before Thanksgiving and had to make changes by Monday morning. Any affiliate that was featuring their products in gift guides or Cyber Monday promotions had to scramble to switch out links. They probably switched out their links to Burt’s Bees products sold on other sites because it was the least disruptive thing to do. Burt’s Bees still managed to move product but affiliates were left with 1) dead links if they didn’t switch them or 2) having to switch out their links right in the middle of a huge shopping spike.

Ruslan Kogan

You may not even recognize his name, but he was the one who started the VentureBeat article exchange with his post “The Big Ugly Affiliate Marketing Scam.” The post in itself was bad enough, making accusations about our industry that were not supported or factual. My further research indicates that Kogan is known for doing whatever he can to stir up PR and that he was dealing with some bad PR issues regarding poor products, bait and switch accusations, and talk of scams. In fact, he was quoted in April as saying ““We can’t afford for someone to go to Google and type ‘Kogan review’ and to read bad things about us.” So he diverted attention from his name and the word “scam” to affiliate marketing.

Daily Deal Sites Who Steal from Their Content Affiliates

I have three of these on my Naughty list and for varying reasons. First, Saving Star got affiliates sending them traffic for grocery coupons and built up their mailing list off of that traffic. Then all of a sudden Saving Star added cash back shopping, which now makes them my direct competitor and the competitor of most of the content sites who are promoting them. Groupon and Living Social did something similar in that they are now listing coupons on their site for online shopping. But more than that, they are “Click to Reveal” coupon codes that are overwriting affiliate links. So if you are promoting Groupon and Living Social for their great daily deals (which they do have), you might end up having them overwrite the cookies of your shoppers while they are there.

Bonus: A certain Facebook group chat. You know who you are. Enough said.

The Nice List

Illinois Supreme Court

While not a part of our industry, the Illinois Supreme Court’s actions this year had huge ramifications for us. In affirming a lower court’s decision that the Illinois “affiliate nexus tax” law was invalid, The Court opened the door to many affiliates being allowed back into programs and hopefully discouraged other states (like Indiana) from introducing affiliate tax legislation in the near future.

Commission Junction

I know I have had a few complaints about CJ this year, but their Deep Link Generator was  a true gift to affiliates for the holiday season. When it comes to creating deep links directly from product pages or internal search result landing pages, this bookmarklet is super easy. It definitely cut down on the amount of time I have been spending on posting daily deals. Anything that can save me time is worth putting on the Nice List.

Brian Littleton

Although Brian is truly one of the nicest guys in our industry, that’s not what has landed him on my List. We all know the great things that he does as CEO of ShareASale (sponsoring Affiliate Summit parties, getting bloggers involved in ThinkTank, etc), but the things he does as Brian Littleton, industry advocate, are even more important. As the Board President of the Performance Marketing Association, he has gotten people involved in both education about the tax laws and the work of the PMA. His “I Love Cyber Monday” t-shirt campaign raised money for the PMA while also fostering a sense of community amongst affiliate marketers.

Cindy Ballard (Greg Hoffman Consulting)

How could I not include my mom when I am planning on spending Christmas at her house? Even if you take the family connection out of the equation, she has been a huge help to my business this year. Between Sunshine Rewards and WineClubReviewsandRatings, I am always calling her for either products to review or coupons to be added or contest sponsorships. I don’t think I get special treatment, but I do think I wear her down when I call 5 times in a day to ask where the Gloss Jewelry coupon is. Industry-wide, she has been at the front of OPMs requiring affiliates to disclose per the FTC Guidelines.

Carrie Rocha

Although Carrie’s area of fame is actually personal finance and blogging (Pocket Your Dollars), she has been getting more and more active in affiliate marketing over the last couple of years. Although our business relationship of starting PYD Rewards has been a success, that’s not the reason she makes my list. As a star blogger, Carrie has a lot of credibility in the blogging community and she has been using that to help other bloggers become better affiliate marketers. In addition to sharing her knowledge with them, she has been a strong advocate for FTC compliance as well as helping bloggers understand things they are doing that are getting their cookies overwritten (promoting other coupon and cash back sites, encouraging toolbars, etc).

Bonus: There are also a lot of people who helped me 1:1 who wouldn’t appreciate me publicly posting about them, so I hope that they know who they are (EN, TF, JS, SB, GH, KA, LP, SC, MW, RS, RN, NS, etc).

Although there are lots of little things that could land people on the Naughty or Nice Lists throughout there year (myself included), I went with just the big things that really stood out to me for 2013.

Who do you think I missed? Who would you add to either the Naughty or the Nice for Affiliate Marketing?