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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 lif

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
    Reviewing a book is not necessarily the same as advertising it, but most reviews do not directly enable purchase of the products they review. If a reviewer is paid by the distributor of the books or products they review and they directly contribute to the sale of the book, they're marketing the book.
  - brown9-2 14y ago
    Receiving money as a result of the link muddies the waters on any discussion of intent.
  - timv 14y ago
    Arguing over the terms is avoiding the crux of the issue. Because (much of) the income for the site came from affiliate links, her revenue was closely tied to what she wrote. And not simply in the "I have to write interesting/helpful things to maintain my readership", but in the "Posting a review of a good book will be financially more beneficial to me than posting a review of bad book". Having those sort of external influences makes it harder to maintain your journalistic integrity. You (are tempted to) get distracted from "which story is best for my readers" to "which story will generate the most income". Having those (undisclosed) external influences, while also being extremely vocal about how external financial motivations are bad for journalism, is hypocritical.
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  That's not necessarily hypocritical. You can dislike something that you are benefiting from. You can also employ a version of selling that is consumer focused rather than business focused; looking at the situation, I believe this is what she is doing. Most of us may see affiliate links and ads as being one in the same, but I don't think they are, and reading into her views I think she has done a good job of explaining the difference.
nollidge 14y ago
OP is mad that Popova is claiming to be ad-free when they believe affiliate links constitute ads. I think it's reasonable to disagree on that point, but that's not what you spent your rant doing.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Supermighty 14y ago
I think it has more to do with influence. Is her choice of topic influenced by her affiliate links? Would she write about a topic if there were no affiliate links to be had. Is her topic influenced by the reward of the affiliate link, would she chose a pricier product to link to over a cheaper link. The OP is upset because they believe Maria Popova is being influenced and is not being open and honest about how she is being influenced.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
filmgirlcw 14y ago
No, the problem is that her site is funded by donations and affiliate links. I'd venture to guess her affiliate links provide most of her income. That's fine. That's better than fine, that's proof that independent publishers and curators can make a living for themselves. The problem is that while taking that additional form of income (which until last week was NOT disclosed on her page -- but in fairness was obvious to anyone with half a brain and any understanding about how this stuff works -- hint, just look for the affiliate code at the end of her Amazon links), Maria has consistently gone on record about the evils of advertising and sponsored content. At the very least, it's hypocritical because affiliate links are in some sense, a form of advertising (at least when undisclosed). She says that she would never recommend or link to something she doesn't actually believe in -- and I believe her -- but without the disclosure (a disclosure the FTC actually requires), it raises questions of improprieties. By NOT being transparent as virtually every other person who does what she does is (look at John Gruber, Marco Arment, Merlin Mann, Jason Kottke and the many, many, many others who came before her who have always made it clear that they get a kickback from Amazon affiliate links), she at the very least loses the right to be as judgmental as she is about how other writers make money, as well as the state of advertising in general. Then there is the unspoken issue, which was the fact that it was discovered back in November that she had maintained a number of spammy (pure, straight-up spam, no ifs ands or buts) affiliate link sites[1] until it was figured out and pointed out by another blogger. Then, magically, the sites disappeared and she made no public comment about it[2]. In light of that, it looks like a pattern. And that pattern, honestly, wouldn't even be an issue for MOST people were it not for the whole attitude of "advertising is teh evil" that she has about other writers and other sites. Then, of course, the other unspoken part is that there is a certain level of schadenfreude for people that are still annoyed over the whole Curator's Code bullshit that happened last year. And I'll be honest -- I made fun of her (and the Curator's Code) endlessly. It was a stupid, self-important, insipid and ill-thought out idea. Maria didn't invent the idea of a link blog and Maria doesn't get to dictate how and in what matter people hat-tip, link back or give a virtual hand-job to other "curators." To be clear -- I'm not condemning her for any way she wants to make money -- I hope she makes $1 million a year off her site, if she does she deserves it -- but I do understand why for some people, it smells bad when someone who is vocally against traditional advertising and sponsored advertising is at the same time making significant money from affiliate links. It isn't about "your band sold out because people like you" - it's more "you condemned other bands for signing to big labels while secretly taking big label money on the sly." My personal feeling: This is unimportant drama that won't matter to the people that visit Brainpickings, like Maria and her work and click on her links. It also won't matter to the editors that commission her work for The Atlantic or the New York Times or whoever. It matters to a small group of pedants who take Poynter's rules of "ethics" as gospel (don't make me laugh) and to a subset of the blogging community who enjoys needling people who they feel have unfairly condemned them in the past. I guess it also appeals to people like myself who enjoy the melodrama and entertainment this episode provides, as it pulls us out of the daily ennui that is tech news the third week of February. [1]: http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36619706595 http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36619706595 [2]: http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36674349201 http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36674349201
SODaniel 14y ago
It is 100% not about the fact that she makes money. It's about the fact that she is soliciting people to donate under the false guise that doing so is what is keeping her 'in business'. It's also important to note that if you blanket your site with affiliate links you ARE more likely to favorably review high % revenue items for example. Making your opinion possibly influenced by factors that your readers are not aware of. These two factors are enough for me to consider her being pretty 'holier than though' in a lot of her statements.
j_s 14y ago
> Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would > have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living. FWIW, Amazon & the US FTC disagree with you on this.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Affiliate links are advertisements, the best kind, they have a call to action "buy this" and a built in tracking mechanism. When you watch CSI on television and they drink pepsi (not coke, not generic cola) that creates a link in your brain that the 'cool kids' on CSI drink pepsi, and a billion studies have shown that this influences peoples choice when they are sitting in the soda aisle at the store buying soft drinks. She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it. That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are more likely to write the truth as they see it. She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time. One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away. This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries. If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.
- clicks 14y ago
  I was mostly agreeing with what you said.. until you somehow conflated steroids to ADHD medication. Steroids are never prescribed by medical experts, ADHD medication is.
oh_sigh 14y ago
I don't get this at all. So you write a comment on HN about a blog you read about another blog? Get a life.
thoughtcriminal 14y ago
You honestly don't get it? You don't see the hypocrisy in this behaviour? You don't see how people who felt the site truly was supported solely by donations and who gave because of that might feel mislead? The issue isn't she makes n amount of money. The issue is what she is saying to her readers isn't actually true.
pwg 14y ago
> 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. I would disagree. The presence of the affiliate links within the articles effectively converts each article into an "advertisement". What is being advertised are the embedded affiliate links. In this way there is created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that likely has a choice effect on what postings are written (advertisements) because there is an incentive to only write postings that will have the largest affiliate click through.
jongraehl 14y ago
The accusation is that the site is recommending things that are likely to sell (are already selling to people who click one affiliate link), not things that are good, all the while lying (to themselves?) that "these are things we'd recommend anyway!" If I were a reader, I'd be angry at being lied to in this way.

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
  Reviewing a book is not necessarily the same as advertising it, but most reviews do not directly enable purchase of the products they review. If a reviewer is paid by the distributor of the books or products they review and they directly contribute to the sale of the book, they're marketing the book.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Receiving money as a result of the link muddies the waters on any discussion of intent.
- timv 14y ago
  Arguing over the terms is avoiding the crux of the issue. Because (much of) the income for the site came from affiliate links, her revenue was closely tied to what she wrote. And not simply in the "I have to write interesting/helpful things to maintain my readership", but in the "Posting a review of a good book will be financially more beneficial to me than posting a review of bad book". Having those sort of external influences makes it harder to maintain your journalistic integrity. You (are tempted to) get distracted from "which story is best for my readers" to "which story will generate the most income". Having those (undisclosed) external influences, while also being extremely vocal about how external financial motivations are bad for journalism, is hypocritical.
run4yourlives 14y ago
That's not necessarily hypocritical. You can dislike something that you are benefiting from. You can also employ a version of selling that is consumer focused rather than business focused; looking at the situation, I believe this is what she is doing. Most of us may see affiliate links and ads as being one in the same, but I don't think they are, and reading into her views I think she has done a good job of explaining the difference.

nollidge 14y ago

OP is mad that Popova is claiming to be ad-free when they believe affiliate links constitute ads. I think it's reasonable to disagree on that point, but that's not what you spent your rant doing.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Supermighty 14y ago

I think it has more to do with influence. Is her choice of topic influenced by her affiliate links? Would she write about a topic if there were no affiliate links to be had. Is her topic influenced by the reward of the affiliate link, would she chose a pricier product to link to over a cheaper link. The OP is upset because they believe Maria Popova is being influenced and is not being open and honest about how she is being influenced.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

filmgirlcw 14y ago

No, the problem is that her site is funded by donations and affiliate links. I'd venture to guess her affiliate links provide most of her income. That's fine. That's better than fine, that's proof that independent publishers and curators can make a living for themselves. The problem is that while taking that additional form of income (which until last week was NOT disclosed on her page -- but in fairness was obvious to anyone with half a brain and any understanding about how this stuff works -- hint, just look for the affiliate code at the end of her Amazon links), Maria has consistently gone on record about the evils of advertising and sponsored content. At the very least, it's hypocritical because affiliate links are in some sense, a form of advertising (at least when undisclosed). She says that she would never recommend or link to something she doesn't actually believe in -- and I believe her -- but without the disclosure (a disclosure the FTC actually requires), it raises questions of improprieties. By NOT being transparent as virtually every other person who does what she does is (look at John Gruber, Marco Arment, Merlin Mann, Jason Kottke and the many, many, many others who came before her who have always made it clear that they get a kickback from Amazon affiliate links), she at the very least loses the right to be as judgmental as she is about how other writers make money, as well as the state of advertising in general. Then there is the unspoken issue, which was the fact that it was discovered back in November that she had maintained a number of spammy (pure, straight-up spam, no ifs ands or buts) affiliate link sites[1] until it was figured out and pointed out by another blogger. Then, magically, the sites disappeared and she made no public comment about it[2]. In light of that, it looks like a pattern. And that pattern, honestly, wouldn't even be an issue for MOST people were it not for the whole attitude of "advertising is teh evil" that she has about other writers and other sites. Then, of course, the other unspoken part is that there is a certain level of schadenfreude for people that are still annoyed over the whole Curator's Code bullshit that happened last year. And I'll be honest -- I made fun of her (and the Curator's Code) endlessly. It was a stupid, self-important, insipid and ill-thought out idea. Maria didn't invent the idea of a link blog and Maria doesn't get to dictate how and in what matter people hat-tip, link back or give a virtual hand-job to other "curators." To be clear -- I'm not condemning her for any way she wants to make money -- I hope she makes $1 million a year off her site, if she does she deserves it -- but I do understand why for some people, it smells bad when someone who is vocally against traditional advertising and sponsored advertising is at the same time making significant money from affiliate links. It isn't about "your band sold out because people like you" - it's more "you condemned other bands for signing to big labels while secretly taking big label money on the sly." My personal feeling: This is unimportant drama that won't matter to the people that visit Brainpickings, like Maria and her work and click on her links. It also won't matter to the editors that commission her work for The Atlantic or the New York Times or whoever. It matters to a small group of pedants who take Poynter's rules of "ethics" as gospel (don't make me laugh) and to a subset of the blogging community who enjoys needling people who they feel have unfairly condemned them in the past. I guess it also appeals to people like myself who enjoy the melodrama and entertainment this episode provides, as it pulls us out of the daily ennui that is tech news the third week of February. [1]: http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36619706595 http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36619706595 [2]: http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36674349201 http://nostrich.tumblr.com/post/36674349201

SODaniel 14y ago

It is 100% not about the fact that she makes money. It's about the fact that she is soliciting people to donate under the false guise that doing so is what is keeping her 'in business'. It's also important to note that if you blanket your site with affiliate links you ARE more likely to favorably review high % revenue items for example. Making your opinion possibly influenced by factors that your readers are not aware of. These two factors are enough for me to consider her being pretty 'holier than though' in a lot of her statements.

j_s 14y ago

> Affiliate links aren't "ads" in any definition a reader would > have unless it is somehow immoral to make a living. FWIW, Amazon & the US FTC disagree with you on this.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Affiliate links are advertisements, the best kind, they have a call to action "buy this" and a built in tracking mechanism. When you watch CSI on television and they drink pepsi (not coke, not generic cola) that creates a link in your brain that the 'cool kids' on CSI drink pepsi, and a billion studies have shown that this influences peoples choice when they are sitting in the soda aisle at the store buying soft drinks. She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it. That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are more likely to write the truth as they see it. She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time. One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away. This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries. If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.

clicks 14y ago
I was mostly agreeing with what you said.. until you somehow conflated steroids to ADHD medication. Steroids are never prescribed by medical experts, ADHD medication is.

oh_sigh 14y ago

I don't get this at all. So you write a comment on HN about a blog you read about another blog? Get a life.

thoughtcriminal 14y ago

You honestly don't get it? You don't see the hypocrisy in this behaviour? You don't see how people who felt the site truly was supported solely by donations and who gave because of that might feel mislead? The issue isn't she makes n amount of money. The issue is what she is saying to her readers isn't actually true.

pwg 14y ago

> 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. I would disagree. The presence of the affiliate links within the articles effectively converts each article into an "advertisement". What is being advertised are the embedded affiliate links. In this way there is created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that likely has a choice effect on what postings are written (advertisements) because there is an incentive to only write postings that will have the largest affiliate click through.

jongraehl 14y ago

The accusation is that the site is recommending things that are likely to sell (are already selling to people who click one affiliate link), not things that are good, all the while lying (to themselves?) that "these are things we'd recommend anyway!" If I were a reader, I'd be angry at being lied to in this way.