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The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

venturebeat.com

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Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#3

Post by psycr »

So it sounds like there's an opportunity for someone here. If you read to the end of the article, you'll note that the actual scam is in spinning up discount code sites.

We need a Rapgenius for online discount codes. Right now, it's full of scummy, crappy sites (just like lyric sites), but could be easily improved with a simple interface, minimal advertising, and collaboratively sourced content.

Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#4

Post by epoxyhockey »

I was expecting to read about click fraud, but it was just a newbie's experience with running an affiliate program.

Kogan had some wild expectation that the majority of affiliate traffic would be first-time visitors to his site. When he uses google analytics to estimate that only 1.6% of referrals were new customers, he trashes affiliate marketing as a business.

Unfortunately, he spent no time thinking about how to optimize his campaign to reward affiliates for first-time customers, among other things.

Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#5

Post by rwhitman »

No shit. This is why you create a page on your site called "Discount Codes". You put in an email signup and offer a small discount coupon. You get the email address in case they abandon and you can re-market to them, and the discount so that they won't abandon, because they found what they were looking for and will complete the transaction. Google will rank you high because its your page and you catch at least some of the search traffic, and you give them what they want with the discount code and they will shop with you. Any retailer worth their salt knows this. Just because coupon sites can game SEO doesn't mean its a scam, it means they're just capitalizing on the fact that you're blind to your customers' behavior

Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#6

Post by scottrblock »

psycr wrote: post #3

So it sounds like there's an opportunity for someone here. If you read to the end of the article, you'll note that the actual scam is in spinning up discount code sites. We need a Rapgenius for online discount codes. Right now, it's full of scummy, crappy sites (just like lyric sites), but could be easily improved with a simple interface, minimal advertising, and collaboratively sourced content.

You mean http://www.retailmenot.com/?

Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#7

Post by Destitute »

There's a lot wrong with this article and it stinks that this person paints the entire affiliate canvas with a poop-colored brush. The fact that they continuously pushed the commission all the way down to 0% is also terrible for affiliates. As people in the comments stated, this was a poorly run affiliate campaign and is no fault but their own. There's "shysters" in every business, and the fact that they pushed down the commission to 0% for all of their affiliates and not just ones taking advantage the coupon code entry field to base their affiliate site on makes me label Kogan.com as "shysters" moreso than all of the affiliates they tried to portary in that light.

Manually approve affiliates that will add value, remove affiliates or don't approve affiliates who are going to advertise non-existent coupon codes. The end, don't treat an affiliate campaign as an easy money button.

edit: And they also seem perplexed that affiliates kept sending $200,000 in sales no matter the commission. True evidence they had no knowledge of how affiliate sites work. If they're performing well, webmasters can essentially set them and forget them. It's not like they're actively working 8 hours a day pushing sales, it can be a static website that never changes as long as the revenue is steady for the affiliate.

Re: The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam

#8

Post by eclipxe »

scottrblock wrote: post #6
psycr wrote: post #3

So it sounds like there's an opportunity for someone here. If you read to the end of the article, you'll note that the actual scam is in spinning up discount code sites. We need a Rapgenius for online discount codes. Right now, it's full of scummy, crappy sites (just like lyric sites), but could be easily improved with a simple interface, minimal advertising, and collaboratively sourced content.

You mean http://www.retailmenot.com/ ?

Retailmenot has gotten much more scammy over the last few years.
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