OK, the title is "slightly" misleading but I think this warrants discussion. A lot of people over at Warrior Forum are talking about this article in the Financial Times about the FTC: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9a58f44c-1fae-11de-a1df-00144feabdc0.html Seems that they don't like bloggers (affiliates?) writing fake or incentivized reviews and they could hold publishers responsible for what bloggers say generally. I personally think that this is much scaremongering over nothing and impossible to enact. If FTC wanna go nuts on internet marketing then first of all it is almost impossible to do (many publishers are not even in the US) and even if they deem someone like CB to be the legal seller then they will drive a lot of trade elsewhere e.g. click2sell.eu. Also, I know that CB have a good relationship with the FTC anyway (see here). So what do you guys think? rolf
I know a few of the CPA networks just went through something similar with bogus Acai blogs touting bloated claims, and G cracked down on them too. BTW Rolf, that "Easy Product Blueprint" you have going is a great package; very well written. Good luck with it!
i think a lot of it stems from an "incident" earlier this year when a <insert electronic's company name here> got caught out because a blogger talking up their product turned out to actually be an employee of the company ... the example in the article " If a blogger ... incorrectly claimed the product cured eczema " ... well personally, my perhaps too moralistic view is that you shouldn't be telling people something does something when it doesn't ... i.e. there should be no need to lie in order to sell your product, and generally you will get refunds if you do anyway ... for example, if i haven't actually used a product then i won't say that i have ... if the vendor is saying "make $50,000 in one day" then i'll cleary say "the main website says you can make this much" - basically putting it all onto the vendor to have to justify their statements, if push ever came to shove ... but really, i think the web is tooo big for this ... does the FTC really care about CB products ... there's a lot of other companies that it would be more interested in before it came after some vendor making a couple of thousand a year IMO, and it would have to go to vendor level, i don't think CB could be done as it doesn't write the reviews or actually sell the products, it's just an agent, like ebay and such ... would only ever really come about if someone got badly ripped off and lodged a complaint i think ...
I don't see how they could ever enforce any kind of penalties as they would need to prove the bloggers were acting as direct agents of the company rather than simply making statements from their own experience. It sounds good from a regulatory perspective but they doesn't mean it would ever be practically enforceable.