jayeff

There have been lots of messages of sympathy and support here today, but if you had the patience to scan back over the past few years on all the boards, you could collect hundreds of threads in which people complained about (often well-known) sponsors ignoring complaints about spam. The conclusion in every one of those threads: they won't do anything about it so long as they earn money.

When the brown-smelly stuff first hit the fan a few months ago, a lot of sponsors either added a no-spam/no-mail rule to their TOS or reminded their affiliates that they already had one. But what are the odds that a lot of affiliates didn't take them seriously: especially the sponsors who already banned spam in theory, but reliably paid out on it? And what are the odds that once they had reminded their affiliates not to spam, that is all most sponsors did? Come to that, what are the odds that at least a few sponsors weren't really too concerned if affiliates went on spamming, providing it didn't backfire on them?

But simply posting a rule, even if it is in large type and not buried in the small print of your TOS, isn't near enough to be considered "due diligence". And it's kind of hard to feel sorry for people who, if they had consulted competent lawyers, would surely have been told that. Basically, if you can be held responsible for what an affiliate does, then you have to put systems in place to demonstrate that you actually check his activities.

As the rules proliferate, the ability of some sponsors to get organized will be tested and their expenses will be increased. So some probably will bring their traffic generation in-house and others will quit. A lot of affiliates will fall by the wayside too over the next 5-10 years.

It is a pity all this is being forced on us from outside, but in the long run, anything which sidelines the cowboys has to be good for the industry.