11 ms·

Making $1 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog

256 points by iamchmod 14y ago

psadri 14y ago
I agree with the main point of the article. However, I can tell you that your $1M in affiliate revenue on 1.2M UV for a literary blog is way off. Your assumption of 10% conversion is off by at least an order of magnitude. The more likely rate is probably less than 1%. This would bring the total amount to around $100K in your calculation.
- aristus 14y ago
  I do (much lower scale) affiliate links and book reviews, mostly for the data, rather than the money. But my conversion rate is something like 23%. With a good niche and qualified traffic (eg most traffic coming from people genuinely linking to you because the content is awesome and relevant) 10% is not impossible.
  - jonknee 14y ago
    Your conversion rate from unique visitors to sales is 23%? What type of traffic are you talking about? That's absurdly high and would still be high for a site that directly sells something, let alone a site that has a link to a book.
    - j_s 14y ago
      People that do the work to find these types of niches don't usually just announce them to the world on Hacker News.
      - jonknee 14y ago
        The amount of traffic is not a giveaway of the vertical. 23% of a 100 visits is something entirely different than 23% of 1,000,000 visits.
        j_s 14y ago
        When you said 'type' (of traffic) above I did not think that meant 'amount'. I do agree that amount of traffic is not a giveaway.
        jonknee 14y ago
        Well I meant both how much and what type (as in direct, referral, organic search engine, paid search engine, etc). 23% would be unbelievable for direct traffic like the blog in question has, but less so for search engine traffic (if you have links to what people were searching about they are many many times more likely to both click and convert than if they are just on their daily read through). He/she could also have meant 23% conversion as reported through Amazon which means 23% of the people who clicked ended up purchasing, also a much more believable number.
- JamesCRR 14y ago
  It's a little more subtle than this I think: he's arguing that across a year maybe 1/10th of the 1.2m monthly unique visitors will buy something. So overall conversion is 1/(10*12) or roughly 1%. Would love to hear from someone who runs a literary b,log though and has better figures.
- AJ007 14y ago
  Unless someone sees the exact numbers, or has a comparable web site, they have no idea what they really are. The author is building one assumption on top of the other, meaning each step off makes the end result even further from reality. I haven't touched Amazon's affiliate program in years, but from what I remember the % of sale was category based, and many items would pay out in the low single digits. Web site owners soliciting donations while making money from affiliate links, not unusual. Owners making money from affiliate links while not disclosing them, even more common. Journalists attacking bias while making money and not disclosing it, unusual and certainly worth investigating.
  - psadri 14y ago
    I was referring to the conversion to sales. What % of people clicking on a link to amazon actually buy a book. What you are referring to is the rev share %: how much of the the sale price amazon shares with the publisher. 10-15% is correct here.
- SODaniel 14y ago
  I think you are pretty much 100% wrong here. With a active user base and the cookie duration for amazon links 10% isn't necessarily far off at all. This of course takes into account high ticket items purchased with active cookie etc.
  - psadri 14y ago
    Not sure what amazon's cookie duration is. But to get enough cookie coverage, a lot of people would have to be clicking out on the links. I simply think that 10% conversion is just way to high. If it was so easy to make a $1 ARPU from a blog, you'd see way more way more bloggers :)
    - jlgaddis 14y ago
      > Not sure what amazon's cookie duration is. 24 hours[0], if I'm reading correctly. > If it was so easy to make a $1 ARPU from a blog, you'd see way more way more bloggers :) If I made $1 ARPU, I'd quit my job and blog full-time. 0: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...
swanson 14y ago
If anyone is interested in turning on Amazon Affiliates for a technical blog, I collected some data over the past few months. I put a single affiliate link on my technical book reviews (sample: http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.html http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.h...). The numbers: https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006 https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006 Not exactly rolling in cash yet :)
- fatalerrorx3 14y ago
  Technology blogs with affiliate links and/or adsense are known to have much lower conversion rates than average because tech savvy people tend to be more blind to ads (and many even use adblockers), and these users are typically aware that these programs exist. I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links, and I can't remember the last time I clicked on an ad on Google or elsewhere.
  - voidlogic 14y ago
    "I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links" Do you do this because you are curious, or because you don't want to click the link if it is an affiliate link? If the latter is the case, it seems strange you would not want to support the tech blogs you read, at no extra cost to yourself, if you already intend to purchase the item linked.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      I tend to have a reflex to avoid affiliate links, if only because I feel like they lead to content generated only to contain affiliate links. (I can recall a few death-of-blog posts where the author didn't say as much, but the content of the post made it clear enough that they had decided they better make some money if they are going to continue writing the blog and apparently the link loaded final post failed to make money)
    - clicks 14y ago
      I think issue here is if you see an affiliate link, you start to question whether the author is heartily suggesting something because he genuinely likes it and wants to recommend it to you or he's just a bored blogger posting a new link on a new day, because that is what he does. On a side note, it seems to me that the author-reader trust is arguably preserved if the author of the articles does not choose what ads appear on his site because it absolves him of the cloud of doubt that he might have ulterior motives. Maybe a lot of the folks doing this are the ones that used to see ads before they started using Adblock, and they still have a memory of ads leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Of course all of this is questioning the model of an ad-supported Internet. This is something I'm still conflicted about -- I really don't want to see ads on Google et al., I mean I really don't, I really wish I could give Google $50/month and tell them hey just focus on the experience, don't show me ads, and I'll be your customer. I'd do this for a whole array of sites on which I begrudgingly use Adblock and other extensions that prevent affiliate links from appearing.
entangld 14y ago
I've read the books she recommends on her website and they are usually thoughtful pieces of writing. I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. I believe she's referring to how she discovered them and not the reason she recommends them. Of course I am giving her the benefit of the doubt because the quality of the content on her site is generally high. She serves her niche of intellectuals fairly well and I think spamming with lower quality content for the sake of making money would be noticed quickly by them. The donations on top of the affiliate links seems a bit much, but I think people might still donate and or purchase in order to show support for her work.
- clicks 14y ago
  > I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. Visiting the website for myself now: http://www.brainpickings.org/ http://www.brainpickings.org/ I think it's clear that she's deliberately and forcefully fishing for clicks on Amazon affiliate link hits. I mean, just take a look at the number of large images (every one of them being affiliate links), one after another, encompassing probably 6-page'fuls at times (and I'm on a 1080p res.). I'm a person who's usually very well aware of what is an affiliate link or not... and yet I found myself strongly wanting to click the images. I don't buy it for a single second that Popova is not exactly aware of what she is doing. Her repeated requests for donations (after every post, in which she stresses that this is a site that doesn't have advertisements) leave no room for doubt -- I strongly believe she is disrespecting the user in a very fundamental way by misleading them like this and playing them on.
  - subpixel 14y ago
    As I write this, there are over 40 Amazon affiliate links on her homepage alone. And as you correctly point out, they're prominently placed (esp. using images) to achieve maximum click-through. She says the affiliate revenue she's downplaying is way, way less than what the article assumes. Well, if I were her I'd: 1) disclose all my Amazon revenue and 2) donate it every month to someplace awesome That'd probably get her more monthly subscribers, earn her more money, and silence the haters. Unfortunately her dissembling on this issue so far sort of edges me into the latter category.
zallarak 14y ago
This post seems too dramatic - it looks like she is simply admitting to learning from what her readers read. If you build an audience writing a certain way, it's likely that your readers also have something of value to contribute and inspecting what they read and in turn offering it to other readers on your website is clever, if anything. Also, it's just not nice to publish personal email communication. Just bring it up with her over a coffee or something.
- corresation 14y ago
  I don't think it's particularly dramatic -- many of us find blogs in general to have more moral ambiguity/flexibility, and less of a understanding of the power of persuasion. This is an absolutely rampant issue (did Marco or Atwood recommend that hard drive or coffee carafe because it's the best...or because it's one that they could post an affiliate link to? What inspired that post?)
kmfrk 14y ago
A, perhaps, more nuanced analysis: 1. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics-maria-popova-edition/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics... 2. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria-popovas-blogonomics-part-2/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria-popov...
- j_s 14y ago
  Thanks for the links, including a response at the end of the first link. From the second link: > To a certain extent, this is a female thing: positive happy > bloggers tend to be female, as do their readers.* > ... > *Update: This sentence has not gone down well in the Twittersphere. Surprise!??
  - clicks 14y ago
    I, for one, would love to read a serious and rigorous research paper (if one's been done?) on the differences between sites mostly populated by females (Etsy, Pinterest, etc. -- to the tune of 80+%, I've heard) vs. ones populated by males (Slashdot, Digg, etc.) -- and how different monetization methods work out for each.
    - j_s 14y ago
      Flurry includes age and gender info on several of their monetization posts: http://blog.flurry.com/default.aspx?Tag=Monetization http://blog.flurry.com/default.aspx?Tag=Monetization
  - homosaur 14y ago
    Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...
geuis 14y ago
Couple of issues with this: 1) The screenshot mentioned in the story shows no clear indications of the advertising he refers to. http://on-advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-pitch-included-at-the-end-of-each-brain http://on-advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-p... 2) Author has included a massive wall of text with little structure. No headings or sections. Makes it harder to get through it. 3) Most important of all, the author does not provide a clear link to the site of the person he is criticizing. This makes it harder for third parties (us) to evaluate his claims.
micahgoulart 14y ago
Here's Maria's response to these accusations: http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator-maria-popova-responds-to-unfair-accusations-with-civility/ http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator-ma... In particular, she states, "Regarding his Tumblr article – first of all, those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I’d be delighted. Delighted!"
- hammock 14y ago
  That seems to imply that before taxes she is making at least $100k
  - ceol 14y ago
    It really doesn't.
  - jongraehl 14y ago
    Assuming literal honesty, "if 1/10 of that, i'd be thrilled!" does suggest that the actual figure is at least 1/20th of whatever "that" was (1.2m/yr?) (but could still be lower).
- SODaniel 14y ago
  A rebuttal on revenue without reveal of the factual numbers is completely useless in my opinion.
JacobAldridge 14y ago
I've been following this story, as my co-founder and I are in the midst of an advertising-policy debate. I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. She may have avoided that in order to hold the "ad-free" moral high ground. The FTC guidelines on this are an interesting read if you make endorsements, even affiliate links, on your site. I'll track it down. EDIT - Here it is: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides...
- j_s 14y ago
  As mentioned in one of the links below, item 10 in the Amazon.com Associates Program Operating Agreement requires disclosure: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper... > You must, however, clearly state the following on your site: “[Insert your name] > is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate > advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising > fees by advertising and linking to [insert the applicable site name ( > amazon.com, amazonsupply.com, or myhabit.com)].”
- mjn 14y ago
  The active claim that there wasn't advertising is what bugs me in this case, more than the links not being labeled. I don't really mind if people include some affiliate links if they aren't particularly spammy (i.e. the content doesn't seem to be written solely as affiliate-link bait), but then if they do so, I wouldn't expect them to solicit donations while claiming to be ad-free.
- cynwoody 14y ago
  >I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. A visit to her site reveals that she has corrected that defect. Down at the bottom, we now see: Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.
fatalerrorx3 14y ago
It looks she now has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says they participate in the Amazon Affiliate program which allows website owners the ability to earn a commission for products that are linked to.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- alistairSH 14y ago
  Sure, but it's located below the donation section, which still claims to be ad free. And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. She can justify it however she wants, but at the end of the day, she's misleading readers (IMO).
  - ceol 14y ago
    > And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. Those "pretty pictures" are often illustrations from the work shown to assist in the review. That's quite the undertone you're wringing out of her rather mundane actions.
    - Amadou 14y ago
      I don't think you understand - the images (at least the ones that got through my adblockers) are hosted on her website. Which is exactly what is needed to illustrated the work in the review. The part that isn't necessary for reviewing is to make the images clickable and link them to the product at amazon. If every image is clickable, why not the entire text of the review too? I think it is a big stretch to assume that anyone who clicks an illustration from a book in a review wants to purchase the book. By making so much of the screen space clickable like that she makes it quite easy for an accidental click to end up "capturing" the affiliate revenue from any amazon purchases that user makes in the next 10 hours (or whatever the amazon affiliate cookie time-out is).
    - GHFigs 14y ago
      Attaching affiliate links to those images is not "mundane". It effectively them into banner ads. She's covering her site in click targets that make her money and then claiming to be ad-free on the same page.
stuffihavemade 14y ago
"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)." How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?
- gregorymichael 14y ago
  Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.
  - stuffihavemade 14y ago
    Thanks for the information all.
  - makomk 14y ago
    Yeah, I've even seen pop-unders on shady sites whose entire purpose seems to be to set Amazon affiliate cookies in the hope of making money off unrelated Amazon purchases.
  - sogen 14y ago
    wow
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- arbuge 14y ago
  That's standard behavior in most affiliate programs, not just Amazons. They just place a sitewide cookie (or less typically, a session variable) with the affiliate's ID in it, as you guessed. It's usually not tied to the purchase of any one particular item, which is what the quote is referring to.
- jaggederest 14y ago
  Yes, absolutely. At one point I made about $100 through amazon affiliates ( a link on Slashdot, actually, quite possibly the only time social media has made me money). What happened was, I linked to a book on programming that was relevant, and being broke at the time, put it as an affiliate link. Someone looked at the book, and went on to buy $2300 or so of camera gear. I got the 4% commission on the whole bundle. You get to see exactly what people purchased (though not, of course, individually, but "X of Y") It's very interesting, if you've never worked with Amazon Affiliates, it's extremely rich data they provide.
jonknee 14y ago
> There are typically 3 articles published per day, and most pages have more than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions let's assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M impressions per year. It's cute that the author thinks number of links = "impressions" and that it has some sort of effect on the number of sales. In reality it's mostly the same people viewing the site every day and very few will end up buying a book, even fewer from the affiliate link (there appears to also always be a link for finding it in your local public library). You could put 100 links in a post and have no more sales than with 1, what matters is if your readers find the book interesting enough to want to pay to read it.
- jmcgough 14y ago
  I believe they are using "impressions" in the technical sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(online_media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(online_media)
jonknee 14y ago
Curious that I didn't see this quoted... http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ > Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price. Update: it looks like that and the site's footer explanation of Amazon links were both added recently (they don't appear in the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpi... )
- ken_railey 14y ago
  Probably because she added that after the articles in question were written.
  - guylhem 14y ago
    That's more than fishy. I wonder if they will vanish in 6 months
ibudiallo 14y ago
Nothing wrong with trying to make money. It's not like she is scamming her readers
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Well some of the argument here is that it is scammy to ask for donations when not revealing the other sources of income the site brings you.
- canibanoglu 14y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying that trying to make money is wrong. It is very disturbing (to me at least) to say that you're funded only by donations while you're embedding affiliate links. People should have the utmost respect for their audience and the person in question has failed there.
  - Amadou 14y ago
    I think that this consistent misunderstanding that she is "only trying to make money" is itself significantly more worrisome than her specific case. I think it speaks very poorly of our profession that so many HN readers have a really hard time grasping the concepts involved with this story. It makes me question if this is simply an area of ethics that most tech-heads aren't very experienced with or if it is something more insidious, more along the lines of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
- 28inch 14y ago
  It is scamming, at least in my book. Of course not the one you go to jail for but still scamming. What makes it even worse is the fact, that she talks about the opposite and judge people for doing the same what she did.
run4yourlives 14y ago
I don't get this at all. So she has a site full of affiliate links because (holy crap) she wants to make some cash. Is OP mad about this? If so, meh, get a life. So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living. So she asks for donations in order to keep ads off her site while at the same time employing affiliate links. I missed the part where there is a law about having multiple sources of income, and so did the company you most likely work for. Would you be happier if she put this entire thing behind a paywall? I really don't understand the logic behind the critique. She provides a service, if you like the service, you get to consume it completely without payment. Now you're bitching because you've found out that she has found a way to continue to offer this service to you for free? The beauty about "reviews" is that if you don't like them - for whatever reason - you stop listening. It's irrelevant whether the person is paid or not for a favourable review if you actually like the end product and agree with the review! The entire idea of "immorality of paid reviews" screams of teenage "your band sold out because lots of people like you".
- ameister14 14y ago
  I think it has more to do with hypocrisy. She bemoans advertiser funded journalism yet makes money from advertisements. She's created an incentive for herself to perform a certain way, and yet writes about the dangers of just such an incentive.
  - axusgrad 14y ago
    The disagreement is over the definition of "advertisement". Is creating a link to something "advertising" it? If the words were the same, but not hypertext, is it still advertising? It was kind of funny how most of the page is linked, it's almost hard not to click through to the page selling the book. For me, linking or "making available" isn't advertising. An advertisement needs to contain content written by an advertiser. Is reviewing a book the same as advertising it?
    - ameister14 14y ago
kriro 14y ago
Looks like someone got some free A/B-testing on add-free vs banner-free out of the exchange :P
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
This discussion is quite long, but for me it's really simple: You don't say your site is ad-free if you get paid for links. Especially inside the donations pitch. I don't care if you take donations, have a paywall, or sell advertisements (the ballet does all three, and that's awesome). Just be honest. A maxim I use when trying to establish honesty: If you write a sentence that a substantial number of readers are misinterpreting, it's usually fair to call it an inaccurate sentence. If it's knowingly left there, it's usually fair to call it dishonest. Exceptions would include technically difficult material. Edit: In this case, both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads. I haven't polled her general readership, but that's a reasonable proxy for how the terms "ad-free" and "affiliate links" are interpreted. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
- arbuge 14y ago
  There's more than honesty at stake here... I'm pretty sure you could run into problems with the FTC (in the USA) if you disregard this principle. See for example http://bvyer.net/info/conduct http://bvyer.net/info/conduct. Other countries might have similar rules.
- radley 14y ago
  The difference is between solicited and unsolicited paid promotions. Popova thinks there's an obvious difference which goes without saying. Bleymaier thinks there's no difference and therefore attacked Popova for being morally bankrupt. Sound about right?
  - greyman 14y ago
    I would side more with Popova here regarding the aff links. She seems to having read hundreds and hundreds of books, and then she picks those which she found interesting and blog about them. But what I see a bigger problem is that her asking for donation is presented to the reader as something which keeps the site ad-free, while it seems to be just another revenue stream.
  - 14y ago
mrbill 14y ago
Wow, Bleymaier comes across as really butt-hurt. There's a big difference between outright advertising on the site / newsletters, and revenue from affiliate links. (disclaimer: I'd never heard of either person involved in this story until I read the article)
simonhamp 14y ago
Oh dear god. One more hypocrite makes illegitimate gains and has whistle blown by jealous, over-zealous loser who believes themselves to be the moral judge/jury/executioner of us all. Next
yourmind 14y ago
scammer.
aresant 14y ago
I am surprised that the FTC's position on this issue is a footnote of the original article and the HN discussion. From FTC Assistant Deputy Rich Cleland: "a disclosure must be made when a blogger is recommending something and using an affiliate link. He went on to say that “the recommendation triggers the disclosure requirement.”(1) There is no wiggle room here. Maria Popova needs to disclose the relationship with her advertisers (Amazon). The FTC has a gargantuan job ahead of them w/regard to enforcement, but that's no excuse especially given the content that Popova writes about. (1) http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include-affiliate-links/ http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include-aff...
- smackfu 14y ago
  Yeah, a lot of prominent bloggers are violating that rule then. Marco Arment (http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review), Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-a-router.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...), not to mention The Wirecutter blog. (http://thewirecutter.com http://thewirecutter.com)
- philip1209 14y ago
  I think the correct way to approach this is to contact the NY State Attorney General's Office and ask them to investigate possible fraud that violates FTC guidelines.
dpweb 14y ago
Competitor of hers maybe? Don't totally disagree but the implication at the end this woman may be engaging in tax irregularities? - that's unfounded and a bit slanderous. Agree though - aff links are ads. You shouldn't say 'ad-free'.
thoughtcriminal 14y ago
I'm not an accountant, but what The Brain Pickings is doing sounds like tax fraud to me, especially the non-profit bit.
paulsutter 14y ago
Affiliate links are absolutely a form of advertising. It's called CPA (cost per action), and its one of the two major categories of performance advertising. The other category of performance advertising is CPC (cost per click), which is most common in search advertising but is also used by Google for their Adwords on-page ads. Banner ads are often sold as CPM (cost per thousand), which is often called brand advertising as opposed to performance. Setting aside semantics, ad-free publications are expected to be influence-free. The minute a publication starts to optimize their affiliate links, they are allowing their advertising revenue to influence their publication. Finally, as another poster has pointed out: using affiliate links is not her mistake. Her mistake is claiming to be ad-free when she is not. And claiming to be supported solely by donations, when she is not. Both of these mistakes are fraud according to the FTC and also under California law (which applies to her readers in California). She is most exposed to a class-action lawsuit from a lawsuit mill. Literally, there are law firms whose main line menu says "press 4 if you have received a class-action lawsuit from us". Changing the wording in response to a complaint, then changing it back after creating an LLC will be the crucial step that the law firm uses to pursue the case against her personally and against the LLC.
- petegrif 14y ago
  Thank you.
sogen 14y ago
Affiliate links are ads, hers'
sogen 14y ago
Affiliate links are ads, hers'
jessep 14y ago
Funny thing is: she could make more money by telling people she gets support from the links. She just needs to spin it correctly.People want to buy these books, knowing it is helping her would only make them want to buy them more. I worked at a non-profit tech company that did a campaign where we got people to use our affiliate code to make purchases on Amazon. People liked doing it, it made them feel good. It also gave them excuse to feel good about going on a buying spree on Amazon. I bet she could significantly increase revenue buy having a button under each book she links to that said, "Help keep this site going, buy this book". And it would also sidestep this whole controversy.
- DustinCalim 14y ago
  I think this is the best idea/solution in this thread...
bjourne 14y ago
Usually, when referring to someone in print, we use their last name. Out of courtesy. So it's "Popova" not "Maria." Also, Bleymaier's estimates on donation and affiliate income are just ludicrous. 50k-100k/year in donations from 1.2 million visitors/month? Yeah, right. :) They take away from the original point he was trying to make, which he could have made without making numbers up out of thin air.
TWAndrews 14y ago
Does the math in the post seem plausible to anyone who uses affiliate links? A .001 click-through rate to Amazon seems plausible, but unless I'm mistaken the author of the post is using that a conversion percentage (i.e. a click-through + purchase), which seems way too high to me, by an order of magnitude or more. Does anyone have solid numbers for click-through to purchase rates of affiliate links?
- jlgaddis 14y ago
  From my own numbers for Q4 2012 from my personal blog: ~6900 "impressions", 577 "product link clicks", 36 "other clicks" (NFI), 8 "total items ordered", 1.31% "total conversion" (as reported by Amazon). $12.15 in earnings.
rflrob 14y ago
> the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think Richard Feynman would do in your situation? At the risk of getting downvoted for a silly comment, there's the Feynman Flowchart: http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-would-feynman-do/ http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-would...
binaryorganic 14y ago
I'm not sure what her support page used to say, but it seems perfectly clear at present. In the same sentence she both says she wants to keep the site ad-free AND confirms that one of the way she does this is through affiliate links: "Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price." Seems like she's being fully transparent.
- tobyjsullivan 14y ago
  The Web Archive tells all: http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpi... The last snapshot was a month ago but it clearly didn't say it then. What do you want to bet the page changed in the last five hours?
philip1209 14y ago
Could a lack of disclosure about affiliate links be a violation of the Amazon terms of service and get her affiliate account canceled?
humanspecies 14y ago
The author of this article came across as a major creep to me. They guy checks emails from 6 months ago and keeps going back to her blog to verify stuff....WTF? I'd be more concerned about this guy than her silly affiliate links.
ommunist 14y ago
Capitalism rewards skilful deception. Yes, she does unethically, but she is rewarded by the system! And read her, she is doing a good job for her readers. Ask yourself - are Google and Yahoo and Yandex doing all right by placing everyone into their individual search bubbles to extract more ad money from AdSense? Probably not.

256 points by iamchmod 14y ago

I agree with the main point of the article. However, I can tell you that your $1M in affiliate revenue on 1.2M UV for a literary blog is way off. Your assumption of 10% conversion is off by at least an order of magnitude. The more likely rate is probably less than 1%. This would bring the total amount to around $100K in your calculation.

aristus 14y ago
I do (much lower scale) affiliate links and book reviews, mostly for the data, rather than the money. But my conversion rate is something like 23%. With a good niche and qualified traffic (eg most traffic coming from people genuinely linking to you because the content is awesome and relevant) 10% is not impossible.
- jonknee 14y ago
  Your conversion rate from unique visitors to sales is 23%? What type of traffic are you talking about? That's absurdly high and would still be high for a site that directly sells something, let alone a site that has a link to a book.
  - j_s 14y ago
    People that do the work to find these types of niches don't usually just announce them to the world on Hacker News.
    - jonknee 14y ago
      The amount of traffic is not a giveaway of the vertical. 23% of a 100 visits is something entirely different than 23% of 1,000,000 visits.
      - j_s 14y ago
        When you said 'type' (of traffic) above I did not think that meant 'amount'. I do agree that amount of traffic is not a giveaway.
        jonknee 14y ago
        Well I meant both how much and what type (as in direct, referral, organic search engine, paid search engine, etc). 23% would be unbelievable for direct traffic like the blog in question has, but less so for search engine traffic (if you have links to what people were searching about they are many many times more likely to both click and convert than if they are just on their daily read through). He/she could also have meant 23% conversion as reported through Amazon which means 23% of the people who clicked ended up purchasing, also a much more believable number.
JamesCRR 14y ago
It's a little more subtle than this I think: he's arguing that across a year maybe 1/10th of the 1.2m monthly unique visitors will buy something. So overall conversion is 1/(10*12) or roughly 1%. Would love to hear from someone who runs a literary b,log though and has better figures.
AJ007 14y ago
Unless someone sees the exact numbers, or has a comparable web site, they have no idea what they really are. The author is building one assumption on top of the other, meaning each step off makes the end result even further from reality. I haven't touched Amazon's affiliate program in years, but from what I remember the % of sale was category based, and many items would pay out in the low single digits. Web site owners soliciting donations while making money from affiliate links, not unusual. Owners making money from affiliate links while not disclosing them, even more common. Journalists attacking bias while making money and not disclosing it, unusual and certainly worth investigating.
- psadri 14y ago
  I was referring to the conversion to sales. What % of people clicking on a link to amazon actually buy a book. What you are referring to is the rev share %: how much of the the sale price amazon shares with the publisher. 10-15% is correct here.
SODaniel 14y ago
I think you are pretty much 100% wrong here. With a active user base and the cookie duration for amazon links 10% isn't necessarily far off at all. This of course takes into account high ticket items purchased with active cookie etc.
- psadri 14y ago
  Not sure what amazon's cookie duration is. But to get enough cookie coverage, a lot of people would have to be clicking out on the links. I simply think that 10% conversion is just way to high. If it was so easy to make a $1 ARPU from a blog, you'd see way more way more bloggers :)
  - jlgaddis 14y ago
    > Not sure what amazon's cookie duration is. 24 hours[0], if I'm reading correctly. > If it was so easy to make a $1 ARPU from a blog, you'd see way more way more bloggers :) If I made $1 ARPU, I'd quit my job and blog full-time. 0: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...

swanson 14y ago

If anyone is interested in turning on Amazon Affiliates for a technical blog, I collected some data over the past few months. I put a single affiliate link on my technical book reviews (sample: http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.html http://swanson.github.com/writeup/2012/10/29/complications.h...). The numbers: https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006 https://gist.github.com/swanson/4711006 Not exactly rolling in cash yet :)

fatalerrorx3 14y ago
Technology blogs with affiliate links and/or adsense are known to have much lower conversion rates than average because tech savvy people tend to be more blind to ads (and many even use adblockers), and these users are typically aware that these programs exist. I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links, and I can't remember the last time I clicked on an ad on Google or elsewhere.
- voidlogic 14y ago
  "I know I for one always hover over links before I click on them to see if they're affiliate links" Do you do this because you are curious, or because you don't want to click the link if it is an affiliate link? If the latter is the case, it seems strange you would not want to support the tech blogs you read, at no extra cost to yourself, if you already intend to purchase the item linked.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    I tend to have a reflex to avoid affiliate links, if only because I feel like they lead to content generated only to contain affiliate links. (I can recall a few death-of-blog posts where the author didn't say as much, but the content of the post made it clear enough that they had decided they better make some money if they are going to continue writing the blog and apparently the link loaded final post failed to make money)
  - clicks 14y ago
    I think issue here is if you see an affiliate link, you start to question whether the author is heartily suggesting something because he genuinely likes it and wants to recommend it to you or he's just a bored blogger posting a new link on a new day, because that is what he does. On a side note, it seems to me that the author-reader trust is arguably preserved if the author of the articles does not choose what ads appear on his site because it absolves him of the cloud of doubt that he might have ulterior motives. Maybe a lot of the folks doing this are the ones that used to see ads before they started using Adblock, and they still have a memory of ads leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Of course all of this is questioning the model of an ad-supported Internet. This is something I'm still conflicted about -- I really don't want to see ads on Google et al., I mean I really don't, I really wish I could give Google $50/month and tell them hey just focus on the experience, don't show me ads, and I'll be your customer. I'd do this for a whole array of sites on which I begrudgingly use Adblock and other extensions that prevent affiliate links from appearing.

entangld 14y ago

I've read the books she recommends on her website and they are usually thoughtful pieces of writing. I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. I believe she's referring to how she discovered them and not the reason she recommends them. Of course I am giving her the benefit of the doubt because the quality of the content on her site is generally high. She serves her niche of intellectuals fairly well and I think spamming with lower quality content for the sake of making money would be noticed quickly by them. The donations on top of the affiliate links seems a bit much, but I think people might still donate and or purchase in order to show support for her work.

clicks 14y ago
> I don't think her statement, that she uses Amazon data to find other books her readers enjoy, is an admission of immoral conduct. She said a quarter of the books she recommends are from information she gained from Amazon. Visiting the website for myself now: http://www.brainpickings.org/ http://www.brainpickings.org/ I think it's clear that she's deliberately and forcefully fishing for clicks on Amazon affiliate link hits. I mean, just take a look at the number of large images (every one of them being affiliate links), one after another, encompassing probably 6-page'fuls at times (and I'm on a 1080p res.). I'm a person who's usually very well aware of what is an affiliate link or not... and yet I found myself strongly wanting to click the images. I don't buy it for a single second that Popova is not exactly aware of what she is doing. Her repeated requests for donations (after every post, in which she stresses that this is a site that doesn't have advertisements) leave no room for doubt -- I strongly believe she is disrespecting the user in a very fundamental way by misleading them like this and playing them on.
- subpixel 14y ago
  As I write this, there are over 40 Amazon affiliate links on her homepage alone. And as you correctly point out, they're prominently placed (esp. using images) to achieve maximum click-through. She says the affiliate revenue she's downplaying is way, way less than what the article assumes. Well, if I were her I'd: 1) disclose all my Amazon revenue and 2) donate it every month to someplace awesome That'd probably get her more monthly subscribers, earn her more money, and silence the haters. Unfortunately her dissembling on this issue so far sort of edges me into the latter category.

zallarak 14y ago

This post seems too dramatic - it looks like she is simply admitting to learning from what her readers read. If you build an audience writing a certain way, it's likely that your readers also have something of value to contribute and inspecting what they read and in turn offering it to other readers on your website is clever, if anything. Also, it's just not nice to publish personal email communication. Just bring it up with her over a coffee or something.

corresation 14y ago
I don't think it's particularly dramatic -- many of us find blogs in general to have more moral ambiguity/flexibility, and less of a understanding of the power of persuasion. This is an absolutely rampant issue (did Marco or Atwood recommend that hard drive or coffee carafe because it's the best...or because it's one that they could post an affiliate link to? What inspired that post?)

kmfrk 14y ago

A, perhaps, more nuanced analysis: 1. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics-maria-popova-edition/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/13/blogonomics... 2. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria-popovas-blogonomics-part-2/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/16/maria-popov...

j_s 14y ago
Thanks for the links, including a response at the end of the first link. From the second link: > To a certain extent, this is a female thing: positive happy > bloggers tend to be female, as do their readers.* > ... > *Update: This sentence has not gone down well in the Twittersphere. Surprise!??
- clicks 14y ago
  I, for one, would love to read a serious and rigorous research paper (if one's been done?) on the differences between sites mostly populated by females (Etsy, Pinterest, etc. -- to the tune of 80+%, I've heard) vs. ones populated by males (Slashdot, Digg, etc.) -- and how different monetization methods work out for each.
  - j_s 14y ago
    Flurry includes age and gender info on several of their monetization posts: http://blog.flurry.com/default.aspx?Tag=Monetization http://blog.flurry.com/default.aspx?Tag=Monetization
- homosaur 14y ago
  Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...

geuis 14y ago

Couple of issues with this: 1) The screenshot mentioned in the story shows no clear indications of the advertising he refers to. http://on-advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-pitch-included-at-the-end-of-each-brain http://on-advertising.tumblr.com/post/42994492644/donation-p... 2) Author has included a massive wall of text with little structure. No headings or sections. Makes it harder to get through it. 3) Most important of all, the author does not provide a clear link to the site of the person he is criticizing. This makes it harder for third parties (us) to evaluate his claims.

micahgoulart 14y ago

Here's Maria's response to these accusations: http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator-maria-popova-responds-to-unfair-accusations-with-civility/ http://www.scilogs.com/next_regeneration/internet-curator-ma... In particular, she states, "Regarding his Tumblr article – first of all, those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I’d be delighted. Delighted!"

hammock 14y ago
That seems to imply that before taxes she is making at least $100k
- ceol 14y ago
  It really doesn't.
- jongraehl 14y ago
  Assuming literal honesty, "if 1/10 of that, i'd be thrilled!" does suggest that the actual figure is at least 1/20th of whatever "that" was (1.2m/yr?) (but could still be lower).
SODaniel 14y ago
A rebuttal on revenue without reveal of the factual numbers is completely useless in my opinion.

JacobAldridge 14y ago

I've been following this story, as my co-founder and I are in the midst of an advertising-policy debate. I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. She may have avoided that in order to hold the "ad-free" moral high ground. The FTC guidelines on this are an interesting read if you make endorsements, even affiliate links, on your site. I'll track it down. EDIT - Here it is: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides...

j_s 14y ago
As mentioned in one of the links below, item 10 in the Amazon.com Associates Program Operating Agreement requires disclosure: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper... > You must, however, clearly state the following on your site: “[Insert your name] > is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate > advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising > fees by advertising and linking to [insert the applicable site name ( > amazon.com, amazonsupply.com, or myhabit.com)].”
mjn 14y ago
The active claim that there wasn't advertising is what bugs me in this case, more than the links not being labeled. I don't really mind if people include some affiliate links if they aren't particularly spammy (i.e. the content doesn't seem to be written solely as affiliate-link bait), but then if they do so, I wouldn't expect them to solicit donations while claiming to be ad-free.
cynwoody 14y ago
>I think the main issue was Popova not disclosing, even in some tiny font somewhere, that there were affiliate links. A visit to her site reveals that she has corrected that defect. Down at the bottom, we now see: Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.

fatalerrorx3 14y ago

It looks she now has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says they participate in the Amazon Affiliate program which allows website owners the ability to earn a commission for products that are linked to.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
alistairSH 14y ago
Sure, but it's located below the donation section, which still claims to be ad free. And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. She can justify it however she wants, but at the end of the day, she's misleading readers (IMO).
- ceol 14y ago
  > And the site itself is JAMMED with affiliate links disguised as pretty pictures. Those "pretty pictures" are often illustrations from the work shown to assist in the review. That's quite the undertone you're wringing out of her rather mundane actions.
  - Amadou 14y ago
    I don't think you understand - the images (at least the ones that got through my adblockers) are hosted on her website. Which is exactly what is needed to illustrated the work in the review. The part that isn't necessary for reviewing is to make the images clickable and link them to the product at amazon. If every image is clickable, why not the entire text of the review too? I think it is a big stretch to assume that anyone who clicks an illustration from a book in a review wants to purchase the book. By making so much of the screen space clickable like that she makes it quite easy for an accidental click to end up "capturing" the affiliate revenue from any amazon purchases that user makes in the next 10 hours (or whatever the amazon affiliate cookie time-out is).
  - GHFigs 14y ago
    Attaching affiliate links to those images is not "mundane". It effectively them into banner ads. She's covering her site in click targets that make her money and then claiming to be ad-free on the same page.

stuffihavemade 14y ago

"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)." How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?

gregorymichael 14y ago
Any purchases made within 24 hours are credited to your account. You can send them to Amazon in buy a $9 book, and if they buy a $2500 TV four hours later, you get your 6%.
- stuffihavemade 14y ago
  Thanks for the information all.
- makomk 14y ago
  Yeah, I've even seen pop-unders on shady sites whose entire purpose seems to be to set Amazon affiliate cookies in the hope of making money off unrelated Amazon purchases.
- sogen 14y ago
  wow
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
arbuge 14y ago
That's standard behavior in most affiliate programs, not just Amazons. They just place a sitewide cookie (or less typically, a session variable) with the affiliate's ID in it, as you guessed. It's usually not tied to the purchase of any one particular item, which is what the quote is referring to.
jaggederest 14y ago
Yes, absolutely. At one point I made about $100 through amazon affiliates ( a link on Slashdot, actually, quite possibly the only time social media has made me money). What happened was, I linked to a book on programming that was relevant, and being broke at the time, put it as an affiliate link. Someone looked at the book, and went on to buy $2300 or so of camera gear. I got the 4% commission on the whole bundle. You get to see exactly what people purchased (though not, of course, individually, but "X of Y") It's very interesting, if you've never worked with Amazon Affiliates, it's extremely rich data they provide.

jonknee 14y ago

> There are typically 3 articles published per day, and most pages have more than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions let's assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M impressions per year. It's cute that the author thinks number of links = "impressions" and that it has some sort of effect on the number of sales. In reality it's mostly the same people viewing the site every day and very few will end up buying a book, even fewer from the affiliate link (there appears to also always be a link for finding it in your local public library). You could put 100 links in a post and have no more sales than with 1, what matters is if your readers find the book interesting enough to want to pay to read it.

jmcgough 14y ago
I believe they are using "impressions" in the technical sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(online_media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(online_media)

jonknee 14y ago

Curious that I didn't see this quoted... http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ > Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price. Update: it looks like that and the site's footer explanation of Amazon links were both added recently (they don't appear in the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116024042/http://www.brainpi... )

ken_railey 14y ago
Probably because she added that after the articles in question were written.
- guylhem 14y ago
  That's more than fishy. I wonder if they will vanish in 6 months

ibudiallo 14y ago

Nothing wrong with trying to make money. It's not like she is scamming her readers

brown9-2 14y ago
Well some of the argument here is that it is scammy to ask for donations when not revealing the other sources of income the site brings you.
canibanoglu 14y ago
I don't think anyone is saying that trying to make money is wrong. It is very disturbing (to me at least) to say that you're funded only by donations while you're embedding affiliate links. People should have the utmost respect for their audience and the person in question has failed there.
- Amadou 14y ago
  I think that this consistent misunderstanding that she is "only trying to make money" is itself significantly more worrisome than her specific case. I think it speaks very poorly of our profession that so many HN readers have a really hard time grasping the concepts involved with this story. It makes me question if this is simply an area of ethics that most tech-heads aren't very experienced with or if it is something more insidious, more along the lines of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
28inch 14y ago
It is scamming, at least in my book. Of course not the one you go to jail for but still scamming. What makes it even worse is the fact, that she talks about the opposite and judge people for doing the same what she did.

run4yourlives 14y ago

I don't get this at all. So she has a site full of affiliate links because (holy crap) she wants to make some cash. Is OP mad about this? If so, meh, get a life. So she says her site is 100% ad free. It is. Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living. So she asks for donations in order to keep ads off her site while at the same time employing affiliate links. I missed the part where there is a law about having multiple sources of income, and so did the company you most likely work for. Would you be happier if she put this entire thing behind a paywall? I really don't understand the logic behind the critique. She provides a service, if you like the service, you get to consume it completely without payment. Now you're bitching because you've found out that she has found a way to continue to offer this service to you for free? The beauty about "reviews" is that if you don't like them - for whatever reason - you stop listening. It's irrelevant whether the person is paid or not for a favourable review if you actually like the end product and agree with the review! The entire idea of "immorality of paid reviews" screams of teenage "your band sold out because lots of people like you".

ameister14 14y ago
I think it has more to do with hypocrisy. She bemoans advertiser funded journalism yet makes money from advertisements. She's created an incentive for herself to perform a certain way, and yet writes about the dangers of just such an incentive.
- axusgrad 14y ago
  The disagreement is over the definition of "advertisement". Is creating a link to something "advertising" it? If the words were the same, but not hypertext, is it still advertising? It was kind of funny how most of the page is linked, it's almost hard not to click through to the page selling the book. For me, linking or "making available" isn't advertising. An advertisement needs to contain content written by an advertiser. Is reviewing a book the same as advertising it?
  - ameister14 14y ago

kriro 14y ago

Looks like someone got some free A/B-testing on add-free vs banner-free out of the exchange :P

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

This discussion is quite long, but for me it's really simple: You don't say your site is ad-free if you get paid for links. Especially inside the donations pitch. I don't care if you take donations, have a paywall, or sell advertisements (the ballet does all three, and that's awesome). Just be honest. A maxim I use when trying to establish honesty: If you write a sentence that a substantial number of readers are misinterpreting, it's usually fair to call it an inaccurate sentence. If it's knowingly left there, it's usually fair to call it dishonest. Exceptions would include technically difficult material. Edit: In this case, both the group paying her (Amazon) and Wikipedia refer to affiliate links as ads. I haven't polled her general readership, but that's a reasonable proxy for how the terms "ad-free" and "affiliate links" are interpreted. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

arbuge 14y ago
There's more than honesty at stake here... I'm pretty sure you could run into problems with the FTC (in the USA) if you disregard this principle. See for example http://bvyer.net/info/conduct http://bvyer.net/info/conduct. Other countries might have similar rules.
radley 14y ago
The difference is between solicited and unsolicited paid promotions. Popova thinks there's an obvious difference which goes without saying. Bleymaier thinks there's no difference and therefore attacked Popova for being morally bankrupt. Sound about right?
- greyman 14y ago
  I would side more with Popova here regarding the aff links. She seems to having read hundreds and hundreds of books, and then she picks those which she found interesting and blog about them. But what I see a bigger problem is that her asking for donation is presented to the reader as something which keeps the site ad-free, while it seems to be just another revenue stream.
- 14y ago

mrbill 14y ago

Wow, Bleymaier comes across as really butt-hurt. There's a big difference between outright advertising on the site / newsletters, and revenue from affiliate links. (disclaimer: I'd never heard of either person involved in this story until I read the article)

simonhamp 14y ago

Oh dear god. One more hypocrite makes illegitimate gains and has whistle blown by jealous, over-zealous loser who believes themselves to be the moral judge/jury/executioner of us all. Next

yourmind 14y ago

scammer.

aresant 14y ago

I am surprised that the FTC's position on this issue is a footnote of the original article and the HN discussion. From FTC Assistant Deputy Rich Cleland: "a disclosure must be made when a blogger is recommending something and using an affiliate link. He went on to say that “the recommendation triggers the disclosure requirement.”(1) There is no wiggle room here. Maria Popova needs to disclose the relationship with her advertisers (Amazon). The FTC has a gargantuan job ahead of them w/regard to enforcement, but that's no excuse especially given the content that Popova writes about. (1) http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include-affiliate-links/ http://lovell.com/corporate-blogs/ftc-guidelines-include-aff...

smackfu 14y ago
Yeah, a lot of prominent bloggers are violating that rule then. Marco Arment (http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review), Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-a-router.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...), not to mention The Wirecutter blog. (http://thewirecutter.com http://thewirecutter.com)
philip1209 14y ago
I think the correct way to approach this is to contact the NY State Attorney General's Office and ask them to investigate possible fraud that violates FTC guidelines.

dpweb 14y ago

Competitor of hers maybe? Don't totally disagree but the implication at the end this woman may be engaging in tax irregularities? - that's unfounded and a bit slanderous. Agree though - aff links are ads. You shouldn't say 'ad-free'.

thoughtcriminal 14y ago

I'm not an accountant, but what The Brain Pickings is doing sounds like tax fraud to me, especially the non-profit bit.

paulsutter 14y ago

Affiliate links are absolutely a form of advertising. It's called CPA (cost per action), and its one of the two major categories of performance advertising. The other category of performance advertising is CPC (cost per click), which is most common in search advertising but is also used by Google for their Adwords on-page ads. Banner ads are often sold as CPM (cost per thousand), which is often called brand advertising as opposed to performance. Setting aside semantics, ad-free publications are expected to be influence-free. The minute a publication starts to optimize their affiliate links, they are allowing their advertising revenue to influence their publication. Finally, as another poster has pointed out: using affiliate links is not her mistake. Her mistake is claiming to be ad-free when she is not. And claiming to be supported solely by donations, when she is not. Both of these mistakes are fraud according to the FTC and also under California law (which applies to her readers in California). She is most exposed to a class-action lawsuit from a lawsuit mill. Literally, there are law firms whose main line menu says "press 4 if you have received a class-action lawsuit from us". Changing the wording in response to a complaint, then changing it back after creating an LLC will be the crucial step that the law firm uses to pursue the case against her personally and against the LLC.

petegrif 14y ago
Thank you.

sogen 14y ago

Affiliate links are ads, hers'

sogen 14y ago

Affiliate links are ads, hers'

jessep 14y ago

Funny thing is: she could make more money by telling people she gets support from the links. She just needs to spin it correctly.People want to buy these books, knowing it is helping her would only make them want to buy them more. I worked at a non-profit tech company that did a campaign where we got people to use our affiliate code to make purchases on Amazon. People liked doing it, it made them feel good. It also gave them excuse to feel good about going on a buying spree on Amazon. I bet she could significantly increase revenue buy having a button under each book she links to that said, "Help keep this site going, buy this book". And it would also sidestep this whole controversy.

DustinCalim 14y ago
I think this is the best idea/solution in this thread...

bjourne 14y ago

Usually, when referring to someone in print, we use their last name. Out of courtesy. So it's "Popova" not "Maria." Also, Bleymaier's estimates on donation and affiliate income are just ludicrous. 50k-100k/year in donations from 1.2 million visitors/month? Yeah, right. :) They take away from the original point he was trying to make, which he could have made without making numbers up out of thin air.

TWAndrews 14y ago

Does the math in the post seem plausible to anyone who uses affiliate links? A .001 click-through rate to Amazon seems plausible, but unless I'm mistaken the author of the post is using that a conversion percentage (i.e. a click-through + purchase), which seems way too high to me, by an order of magnitude or more. Does anyone have solid numbers for click-through to purchase rates of affiliate links?

jlgaddis 14y ago
From my own numbers for Q4 2012 from my personal blog: ~6900 "impressions", 577 "product link clicks", 36 "other clicks" (NFI), 8 "total items ordered", 1.31% "total conversion" (as reported by Amazon). $12.15 in earnings.

rflrob 14y ago

> the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think Richard Feynman would do in your situation? At the risk of getting downvoted for a silly comment, there's the Feynman Flowchart: http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-would-feynman-do/ http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/what-would...

binaryorganic 14y ago

I'm not sure what her support page used to say, but it seems perfectly clear at present. In the same sentence she both says she wants to keep the site ad-free AND confirms that one of the way she does this is through affiliate links: "Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price." Seems like she's being fully transparent.

tobyjsullivan 14y ago
The Web Archive tells all: http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/donate/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116151028/http://www.brainpi... The last snapshot was a month ago but it clearly didn't say it then. What do you want to bet the page changed in the last five hours?

philip1209 14y ago

Could a lack of disclosure about affiliate links be a violation of the Amazon terms of service and get her affiliate account canceled?

humanspecies 14y ago

The author of this article came across as a major creep to me. They guy checks emails from 6 months ago and keeps going back to her blog to verify stuff....WTF? I'd be more concerned about this guy than her silly affiliate links.

ommunist 14y ago

Capitalism rewards skilful deception. Yes, she does unethically, but she is rewarded by the system! And read her, she is doing a good job for her readers. Ask yourself - are Google and Yahoo and Yandex doing all right by placing everyone into their individual search bubbles to extract more ad money from AdSense? Probably not.