Ok, Here's a question for the masses: "Do you care about the history and ethics of your affiliates?" Let's say you are a publisher and you are relying on exchanges for your distribution. You're fairly well established and don't want to hurt your reputation at this point (I'm guessing that reputations still matters to some) but you find out through some online reaserch that your exchange has a bad track record, and it's in a financial space. You are moving leads but you're concerned about how it could affect you in the long run, sorta like the fall out from EDP a year ago or so(eDebit Pay). What do you do? Cut off relations with them or press on hoping that nothing happens to you because of their practices? I guess the question might be "how much do you let the ethics of your partners/affiliates affect the way you make decisions?" I'm interested in your opinions. As I check this thread, I'll spin it a little bit as this is a very intereting topic to me. Ethics and business practices are some of the most important keys to a successful business relationship and I get the feeling that sometimes the "hit and run" method of making money on the internet is more favorable to some than simply doing it the right way first.
I think the ethics of your affiliates is important so in short I would say yes - it matters to me. Someone once described affiliates as your 'online sales force' and as such are a point of contact for your business. If the ethics of that point of contact are dubious and compromise your image - then they compromise your business.
People are always going to associate the people who are working for you with your actual company which is why it's so important to have an active affiliate manager monitoring affiliate campaigns and detecting if there's any wrongdoing. I know companies that have went under due to 3-4 bad affiliates killing the site domain and web hosting through spam emails. The company made money for about 2 weeks but after that the website was shutdown forcing the owners to start all over again. So yeah, be careful who you have as an affiliate..
You have to make a point to be as ethical as possible. Once you go down the other road you are asking for problems eventually. Same would go for affiliates. They represent you in one way or another. Any negative view on them becomes a negative view on you.
Ok, I was a bit worried to see so many views of this thread with so few responses. Kind of made me think that this really isn't important to any of you. I'm certainly glad to see that at least some of you are concerned when it comes to ethics. The spin.... "When does it become a situation where you would choose to shut down an affiliate because of their ethics and business practices?" What is 'too much'? What's your breaking point? Ethics matter as they are the morter that holds the foundation of your business together. Without them, your foundation, no matter how well built, has cracks and flaws. And over time these cracks and flaws become accentuated by the strain of your business practices. Once people see a weakness, they will relentlessly pick at it. The only way to ensure you don't get picked apart is to shore up your foundation with solid ethics. That should be what you want people to say about you.."he/she sure does business right." It's refreshing to hear as this industry has had the same public view as used car salesmen of the 70's. If you're going to stand out, stand out for the right reasons.