In response to an article on plasticbag.org about the ethics of weblogging, I posted a reply, which I'm extending here. I feel similarly about the creeping commercial activity on websites that are ostensibly uncommercial. Consider this post my declaration of interests. Since launching this website I have been observing my behaviour, I started writing quietly on my own for a month or so. Once I had a public blog, I thought that I'd want to recommend books to friends and family, so I setup a Amazon associate account. I noticed that I'd be tempted to write about a book I read sometimes just to link to it in the hope that someone might buy it and i'd offset my hosting costs. I've resisted and only linked to books etc where I genuinely have enjoyed or think the author is great. Hence no banner ads or blatant electronics promos, my website is my thoughts, not a catalog.
One of the things I noticed was the benefit I was providing to amazon in terms of better deep links into their site. It struck me that I was probably doing more work than I was getting in return from sales in a purely monetary analysis. So why do I continue? partly because I want to tell people about books etc I've read, but if I tell them then they might want to read it, so amazon provide a service by selling the book I'm talking about. To paraphrase the cluetrain, if our weblogs are a conversation and conversations are about the exchange of information. Sometimes I can't share the information because it is a book or a film, so I link to a source for the product and I happen to make a small percentage on the linking.
I guess it is a fine balance, you can see if someone has a book for sale every link, or has lots of banner ads, so you can read the commercial activity of the author. We are quite attuned to product placement having seen countless examples of it since the soaps started. Yet it is reasonable for a website host to make some money, if it has no direct cost to the person who buys a product. I'm less clear about the paypal or amazon honour schemes, but can see they have their place for some people. I suppose implicit advertising is harder to track, if the fact that I talk about is reasonable, what happens if I have an Store affiliate, does this make me a bad blogger ?
On a different note this micro economy does provide a mechanism for amazon and google to aggregate us and thus look at higher level population stats, they can analyse the incoming clicks and do trend analysis for ads or offers. So if we as a body didn't use amazon or google then they'd lose a good source of market intelligence.
Finally to declare my interests, on here you will find amazon links (I get 5-15%), a link to the cotswold outdoor store (I get 6%), later there might be an store link (I'll get 2.5%). Hopefully none of it is too prominent.
Leave a comment