Our Position on FTC’s New Guidelines
Last Fall, the FTC published an updated 81 page guideline governing endorsements and testimonials that became effective December 1st, 2009.
Since then, we’ve seen a slow adoption of affiliate marketers who have been including various forms of compensation disclosure in their resource boxes (located below the article body). Honest affiliate marketers are not scared by increasing transparency whereas many fear that an increase in disclosure will result in a decrease in conversion results.
One area of the new guidelines that didn’t impact the EzineArticles system is that marketers are now required to clearly state the substantiated generally expected results along with the spectacular results when used in testimonials. Because the greater majority of articles do not include testimonials, we don’t feel the need to make any ruling here. It’s our hope that most expert authors will keep their testimonials on their website and not in their submitted articles.
For consistency sake, we’ve decided that the material relationship disclosure should be uniform throughout EzineArticles.com and on a per-article basis located directly below the resource box. We need your help to determine what that disclosure should be. Here are two examples to get your feedback on:
Example A:
"Affiliate Disclosure: $AUTHORNAME may receive compensation for products and services promoted in this article."Example B:
"Affiliate Disclosure: Assume that any mention of a product or service in this article is made because there exists a material connection between the product or service and this author. Should you make a purchase of a product or service described here the author of this article may be compensated."
Which do you like best? Do you have an alternative disclosure statement you’d like us to consider?
Members will be asked to check a box on each article submission to disclose to us that they are including affiliate link(s) in their article and/or resource box. When that box is checked, the default disclosure will be included. If a member fails to check the box and we determine they pitched an affiliate link, we’ll add the disclosure.
Your thoughts?
Keith,
I’m not certain the reach of the FTC, but because our servers are based in the USA, we’re going to apply their standards to all members regardless as to where your links point to.
I do agree that a shorter statement is better than a longer one.
For clarification, we DO accept articles that link to affiliate links, but not directly… ie: You’ve got to own the domain that redirects to the affiliate link.
March 31, 2010 at 9:47 AMhttp://ezinearticles.com/author-terms-of-service.html
[Reply]
I’d never thought of pointing to a page that does a redirect – this all makes a lot more sense now!
Not something I’ll be doing – all my links go to pages for people to read, with maybe affiliate links / adsense etc on. So my articles should not be affected. Or maybe it is something I should try!
Thanks
April 1, 2010 at 8:01 AM[Reply]