Saw this in Twitter tonight
I’m no longer an affiliate. Jason Calacanis is now an affiliate. My head is spinning. At least equilibrium is retained. You win one, you lose one.
(OK, if you haven’t been keeping up, I am actually still an affiliate marketer, among other things. I was just making a point last week.)
This is actually really good, and the sort of stuff that comes out of the discussions that get started from controversial events like Jason’s keynote at Affiliate Summit.
Coming off that talk, where Jason promoted strongly the importance of disclosure of affiliate links, he’ll now be faced with that same question on Mahalo. And thanks to the astute Shawn Collins, he’s facing it already:
I replied, and would say more there, but i don’t think he’s following me. Alas.
If he groups them all into a single section, they’ll be easy to label as “sponsored links”.
But affiliate marketing allows for such tighter integration, down to a text link embedded into some copy, like on the much more text-centric Mahalo how-tos. Disclosure on those sorts of links get a bit trickier. Label the link itself? Put a disclaimer at the page level somewhere?
It’s on pages like how-tos that affiliate marketing, disclosed or not, can pay off. But will such easily tuneable monetization cause bias on pages like this?
Further, affiliate Marketing has some nice features that Jason may be able to apply to Mahalo and the Greenhouse model. Every transaction that happens through an affiliate link can be tracked and traced back to the exact click. From here he can track exactly what’s working and what’s not, ditch the losers, keep the winners, and even implement a rev-share with the editors. Oooh.
Careful though. Money changes everything. You don’t need to look much beyond Squidoo to see that.
Added: Sam caught this too.
