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Ethical? Better question, are the affiliate links going to the writer’s account or MSNBC?
Scroll down to the fifth paragraph of this article about online dating to see affiliate links to GothicMatch and FarmersOnly (odd niche but it claims to have over 59,000 members.)
Update: As readers pointed out, the affiliate link for FarmersOnly has been removed, GothicMatch and GreenFriends’ affiliate links remain.
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The article seems a bit off to me too. Reads more like a blog post than an MSNBC news article. Seems like they didn’t run it past their style editors (internal style manual). I would assume those aff links belong to the writer. It seems to have an inordinate umber of links anyway.
Comment by Marc — April 28, 2007 @ 3:23 am
Aff Links seem to have changed now.
Now FarmersOnly has no affiliate Id, and Green Friends does.
Comment by Chris — April 28, 2007 @ 5:22 am
I think news articles should be stripped of all affiliate links, especially when they are from ‘credible’ sources such as MSNBC. Including affiliate links is no different from writing favourable articles about companies for financial gain and should be avoided by respectable journalists unless full disclosure is provided.
Comment by Martin Reed — April 28, 2007 @ 8:09 am
My first thought was that the writer had clicked on an affiliate link while doing research and then copied and pasted that URL into the article.
The fact that the links have changed makes me question that assumption.
If it is in fact MSNBC, you would really think that they would be sophisticated enough to create affiliate links that do not obviously look like affiliate links…
Bottom line is that of the people that read this article, very few would even be aware of what an affiliate link is.
My thinking is that if you are going to link to a page anyway and send them traffic that might earn them money, then there is no harm in trying to add a link that will pay you a commission, because your article did in fact generate that lead.
It is not unlike local newspapers who do public interest/feel good type stories on local companies who just happen to be advertisers in that paper.
The newspaper does not explicitly say if you advertise so many times we will do a story about you, but it is good business to try and help people that generate revenue for you to succeed.
If you were thinking of writing that story and then chose one of your advertisers as a subject, I think that is acceptable. If you write the story as a condition of advertising, I think that is wrong.
A very fine line indeed.
Comment by Diorex — April 28, 2007 @ 10:42 am