Has anyone heard about this??? I posted this in the Affiliate forum, but thought I should post it here too. Someone posted a letter over at another forum that looks and sounds official to me. It was received from Adwords saying they soon will not allow CPA free trial/rebill offers and other "Unacceptable Business Practices" including fake celebrity endorsements. Note: The part in bold is not up to the affiliates. They are not saying the disclosure needs to be on the affiliate's landing page, it needs to be on the payment page, so affiliates will need to find offers that comply with Google's new rules if they want to continue to run their free trial, rebill offers. Note 2: The part in RED is good news because for a change they are giving advertisers notice and a chance to correct the problem instead of just banning accounts. What do you think?
I spoke to a Google employee yesterday and found that the flogs and such are the reason they're having to crack down. The FTC is getting involved to police advertising policy on the net the way they do on television. And affiliate sites will need to disclose their relationship to vendors. Total pain for those of us with a lot of real estate. Web developers are going to be happy though. A ton of work for them!
Unfortunately, this is not something new in the United States, Canada and many other countries. The difference is that government regulation is finally starting to catch up with the Internet. Take for example at the bank - banks offer life insurance, disability insurance, etc on your mortgage, line of credit, credit cards etc. They always use one company as their insurance supplier. If you read the fine print on your loan documents, it will tell you that the bank receives compensation for "processing and administering this insurance product". If you recommend something to the public, you need to disclose that you receive compensation for this recommendation if people act on it. Government legislation on this has been around for years but as with everything on the internet - it takes the government years to catch up to what we are all doing.
Well the FTC issue is separate from this Adwords crack down on CPA/rebill offers. But I guess it does have something to do with the fake testimonials part of the letter above. For good info about the FTC issue and what you can do about it, see this DP thread: New FTC Rules, Fines to $11,000 - Affiliates and Bloggers Must Read