Archive for the ‘Industry News’ Category

Volk leveraging the buzz to talk about shit on video. I once dickrolled Tyler Cruz on one of his lame ass cam feeds of him just sitting in a chair. true story.

Winner gets 10 free copy of Jon Volk’s Affiliate Marketing Guide.

Are you an affiliate network?

Are you having trouble deciding if you want to put that offer on your network?

Please use this handy chart for your decision making process.

Yes, I stole this headline from Turbolapp when she made a thread about it in the mod section on WF. (Also the drama there about this is just as thick)

Anyway…

What the fuck? Why? How the fuck did this shit storm happen?

If you haven’t been following this drama at all, let me paraphrase.

1.) Nickycakes releases a product that does something. It addresses the issue that there are a bunch of no-talent ass clowns who rip landing pages. It will block about 96% of them but anyone with half a brain could get around it.
2.) Uber Affiliate waits in the the shadows for what seems like a year. He probably has cut mark on his wrists to “release the pain” from when Nickycake’s destroyed his UberCamp. Uber makes this thread which exposes a number of holes within Nickycakes’ software.
3.) The Wickedfire Mob gets offended that Nickycakes would sell a product to them. Collecting IPs, not offering a self-hosted version, lack of trust, etc etc etc.
4.) Wickedfire members get sand in their vagina and bash away at their keyboards in a rage from their mothers’ basements. At this point, I have no clue what anyone is arguing about anymore because I don’t fucking care.
5.) There are like 5 threads dedicated to this situation with close to 30,000 views.

You people are acting like Nicky raped your fucking mothers or something. If you don’t like it, don’t buy the fucking product.

If you’re sad your IP got recorded, well YOU GOT GOT!

If you just hate Nickycakes, then you’re probably with 50% of people in this field. Love him or hate him.

If you’re taking great joy in the opportunity to bash Nickycakes, waiting years for this moment after all the shit he talked about people, then you are Uber Affiliate.

Personally, I think Uber is mad that this product didn’t exist when the bid prices for “chat” keywords skyrocketed.

The problem I see with this product, aside from all those issues addressed in the thread, is that it has an incredibly small audience (people who actually make money with affiliate marketing), and it was released like a year too late.

I would have to hire a full time writer to begin to scratch the surface on this drama. I really don’t give a fuck, so if you want to throw in your three cents, go to Wickedfire.

I heard a thing or two about this way back when, but never thought Dennis Yu actually worked for the FTC.

But thanks to this tip from pwebbiz, it’s actually fucking true. Peep this document and skim to the last page.

It appears that, looking at the actual FTC Privacy Roundtable site, anyone can apply to be in these roundtables. Knowing Yu, he wants to get his name out there anyway he can, so if it all it takes is an application then he probably got one of his lackeys to do it.

Dear FTC. I know we’ve had our differences. But lets be real here. Do you even do a background check on these people? All you see is someone’s credentials, and figure, “Sure, fuck it, he looks legit.”

Maybe you did your research and realized you have the squeeling pig you’re looking for to rat out the whole industry. In that case, good move FTC. Good move.

These guidelines come from HealthCoverter. I never heard of the company until today. How the guidelines originated is top-secret, but they’re here now.

Download the new Guidelines

Don’t get it twisted – these are not laws from the government. They are simply new guidelines that the industry can choose to follow. If everyone is talking about “cleaning up our act,” this 6 page sheet is a good starting point.

The gravy train has passed. Everyone pushed it too far and the industry got a slap on the wrist from the gub-ment (while some face an anal-raping.) Will we ever see a $10 EPC again? Probably not, but you can still stack paper (just maybe not as high as skyscrapers.)

Your move, industry.

Also, the rebill is dead.

If you went to Affiliate Summit West, you must have noticed the tote bag they give you when you register. Well, you had to have noticed it as your arms tired from carrying a 30 pound bag of shit.

Not to get off topic, but what the fuck are they thinking putting all this crap in the bag? There is so much fucking waste that goes on and it provides no value. You think someone is going to sign up to your stupid network because you gave them a non-functioning orange clock or a rubber ball with your name on it?

(I would have more jokes here about the shwag but I threw the bag out. I didn’t want to go over 50lb weight limit for checked bags on my flight home. Take that, environment!)

I threw that fucking rubber ball at John Chow’s iron-flattop and it bounced off and hit Shoemoney in the crotch. That’s all its fucking good for.

Branding = dead. (At least in this industry … your reputation is what matters.)

Anyways, within that tote bag was Shawn Collins book. This book is called Internet Marketing from the Real Experts. If you haven’t skimmed through this book on the shitter by now, let me give you my short book report:

Internet Marketing for Real Experts is a collection of republished articles from Feedfront magazine. Not only does Shawn Collins not really write even a minority of the book, all this book really contains is other peoples content.

That will be all, teacher.

During ASW I caught Shawn Collins at the Rio. The conversation was just random bullshit about how I am the best blog ever, until I called him out on his book. I was in a daze from drinking of course, so I will try to reproduce the conversation as best as possible.

Me: “So dude, you didn’t really write this book.”
Shawn: “Yes I did, my name is on the cover!”
Me: “I know, but it’s just republished garbage from Feedfront.”
Shawn: “Yeah, but I’m in the book.”
Me: “But you didn’t write it. You’re more of an editor.”
Shawn: “It doesn’t matter. Do you know how impressed clients get when you bring in a book with your name on it? No one ever reads the book, but they see the cover and my name is on it.”
Me: ” … ”
Shawn: “Clients eat that shit up. Usually it’s way over their heads so they don’t read it. All that matters is that I’m the author and I have a book.”
Me: “Genius, Collins. Genius.”

So what’s the lesson here? Leverage other peoples shit and republish content with your own spin on it. It works on the web and apparently, works in print. Now Collins has a book selling like hot-cakes on Amazon so he can walk around slapping potential clients with the softcover. Learn from this.

Where to begin?

I arrived in Vegas on Saturday afternoon. I checked in at the Gold Coast, and while I waited for my room I tore up some Ping Pang Pong on Nickycakes‘ recommendation.

Last year was my first time in Vegas for ASW, and I stayed at the Gold Coast with a bunch of friends and had a blast. This year I checked in and realized that the novelty of staying at one of the most ghetto hotels in Vegas has worn off. You could entertain yourself for hours just sitting on the Gold Coast casino floor, people-watching the degenerates of society. You could probably shoot up heroin on the floor and no one would care.

Saturday Night Adventures

I wanted to dedicate a day to gambling, which would be Texas Hold’em cause that is all I play. I got into a $150+$20 Multi-table tournament with like 85 people. First place was a little over $4,000 which looked juicy. Unfortunately I busted out 12th or so, right on the bubble. This was quite unfortunate because I realized I wasted like 5 hours of my life for nothing. Fuck you Vegas.

After that, I met up with the one and only Dullspace. Dullspace snags up bottle service at Toa nightclub, which was packed as fuck but the drinks were flowing. When it was time to bounce out of there, Dullspace had a full bottle of Grey Goose which I attempted to sneak out for him.

Unfortunately I got busted, and had to dispose of the Grey Goose or pour it into another container. That container was a plastic cup. Drunk as fuck at this point, we offered Grey Goose shots to random pedestrians, who, needless to say at, were not too ecstatic about being offered expensive beverages from a plastic cup. Even the cab-driver to the Palms didn’t want to take a shot. Unscientific.

If you have been to the Palms, you know it has a McDonalds, and this is one of the few places to grab food at this time of night (nearing 4 AM). When our time to order comes up, Dullspace whips out his black card and buys out the McDonalds. All they had left was 50 chicken nuggets, which wasn’t too much, but it was enough to piss off the 20 or so customers behind us who quickly realized there was no food for them.

Proof:

After downing 20 chicken nuggets or so, it was time to call it a night.

PPC.bz / NickyCakes / Neverblue / Plenty of Fish Party

Sunday night was the night of the Affiliate Summit Parties. There were many, but only one involved the Paper Clique.

Props to Neverblue for setting up everything from start to finish. All Barman and Nickycakes had to do was invite people and say “hey we having a party” – the rest of the work was done by Neverblue.

Unfortunately, getting Playboy bunnies to walk around half-nude or putting an Acai Berry Jell-o wrestling pit together was out of the question. Corporate overlords, what can I say?

That would’ve evened out the girl guy ratio no doubt, but if you have been to these parties before then you know they are male-dominated. Just accept these facts and move on with your life. We be nerds and we were hear to see nerd-core music.

YTCracker, Rob Hustle and Mic DaVice Hold it Down

Freestyles from Rob Hustle and Mic DaVice, and YT Cracker on the 1’s and 2’s – dream come true son!

There were many fans of these all-stars in attendance and they were very please. If you were into nerd-rap before, you are now.

YTCracker can spin like an animal and held the music down. He also performed his classic hits like on my starship and lol money money lol

Rob Hustle and Mic DaVice are simply the Kings of Freestyle. Tell them one thing to rap about and you have 16 bars, all off the top of the dome.

YTCracker

Rob Hustle – Kiss the Chain

Mothafuckin’ Mic DaVice

Mic DaVice and Rob Hustle

Winkie, Eleah, Nickycakes, Barman, Amber

Check out the flickrstream from AdRants for more pictures from our party, and the other Affiliate Summit shenanigans. Dude has picture-taking skills.

Moar pics from Neverblue

Honorable Mention

Meeting Fans of PPC.bz

It is truly amazing how many people enjoy PPC.bz. Out of all the blogs you can read, it’s non-stop “You’re the only blog worth reading” to “I love you” to “Here, have some free drugs.” I guess we keeps it real.

Texas de Brazil

Before the party, Neverblue took us out to Texas de Brazil. I never dined at a Brazilian restaurant before, but this was some of the best food I’ve eaten in years. Highly-recommended.

Shawn Collins, Actually Cool

I ran into Shawn Collins for a few minutes while grabbing lunch. I never met him before and did not know what to expect. It turns out he is funny as fuck. Expect some guest-posting from PPC.bz in Feedfront magazine to bring up the quality of that magazine.

Sorry Shawn, I only spent 10 minutes on the conference floor. There’s only so much pitching from networks you can handle.

Lapdances with Circa

The Spearmint Rhino. It’s quite the experience. Words really can’t describe how great this place is. Even though I’m not a fan of strip clubs in general, the Spearmint Rhino is on a whole other level.

Some of you were dying to get even a picture with Circa, while Barman was getting lap dances with him at 5 in the morning.

The Rebill is Dead

RIP Rebill 2009. This was the underlying theme of the conference. Rebills are dead guys. It was fun while it lasted, so let’s move onto promoting cost-per-sale with 5% commissions at Amazon.

Overall, Affiliate Summit Vegas 2010 was a great time. If I make it to 2011, I expect to stay 4 or 5 nights instead of the usually 3. There is just so much shit to do you can’t pack it into 72 hours.

Holla at me if you got stories or pictures or video. Barman [at@] ppc.bz.

Amit decides to “defend” himself” against the PPC.bz post made last week. You can read it if you want, but it’s pretty pointless.

The main point of our PPC Classroom post is that affiliates aren’t getting paid and no one is buying that shit. Amit admitted it himself in the leaked convo. Amit himself said PPC Classroom is going down the shitter.

Amit does not address that fact at all in the post – just defends himself and his Adwerdz skills, which is fine – but yo, I’m just saying …

You thought PPC.bz was going to leave you hanging without some good drama before Affiliate Summit West? Well, ye have little faith.

This is a story about PPC Classroom. It’s some newbie PPC coaching shit run by two guys. One person is Amit Mehta, who has a fancy “crib” in Boston somewhere. The other guy, who is less known, is actually the owner of it, and his name is Anik Singal. You would think Amit actually owned it with all the promotion he does for it, but you are wrong. He is just an affiliate / partner.

Make sure to remember the difference between these people because it is important. If you want to entertain yourself with the PPC Classroom sales page, you can read it here: PPCC

PPC.bz has more inside sources than the CIA, so I am always getting e-mails from people with leaked conversations, stories, and all types of shady drama. This is one such instance of juicy inside information. This is direct from an inside source at PPC Classroom.

The charlatans in this industry are everywhere you look. I have a problem with PPC Classroom because it charges people close to $100 a month for information that doesn’t teach them shit. It’s all bullshit. Newbies sign up thinking they will see instant riches, but get led down the road to failure. There are some many over-hyped, bullshit products in this space it is near impossible to find anything worth buying.

It’s all fucking hype and very little substance, and products like these fleece people for their hard-earned dollars they made working the manager’s position at Burger King.

I hate “Gurus” PPC Classroom is going under, but we’ll save that part for the end of this post.

Let’s get this road on the show!

Amit Doesn’t Actually Know Adwords

How does someone who doesn’t actually know Adwords going to teach people about … Adwords? I don’t fucking know.

Source says: Amit only had like 2 successful campaigns. One was a regcure campagin, and one was public records. Thats it. I saw inside his Adwords account and it was a complete joke. He basically got REALLY lucky. I mean he had adgroups and keywords stuck all over the place. It looked like some total newbs account, basically nothing like anything he teaches.

PPC Classroom has survived this long without being exposed for the shit that it is because they hire “coaches.” Coaches are just regular people that get paid by PPC Classroom to be active on the forum, help people, and all that shit. Do you think Amit is spending his day with hands newbie-hand-holding? No.

Granted, Amit did cash in on Adwords. This is nothing to scoff at. But the fact that he is leveraging this luck into a coaching program is the crock of shit.

It’s comparable to writing a “How to win big playing slot machines!” book. Do you think Amit ever told people what he was promoting so they can make money “Step-by-step” like he was doing? Fuck no.

Inside source says: “We would have webinars, etc and he wouldn’t be able to answer questions from students about somewhat basic stuff.”

Amit has no doubt made money pushing Guru snake oil than he ever had made with Adwords.

Now you may be bugging out thinking I’m a dickhead for outing his niches. See the next section.

Amit Got Banned from Adwords. Twice.

Amit is already running his mouth, teaching people how to not get banned from Adwords. Motherfucker, you got banned twice!

Direct from leaked convo:

Amit says: “I got banned twice. Every affiliate site I put up is getting slammed!”

Full. Of. Shit.

PPC Classroom Sells Out Its Students

This is nothing earth shattering. If you have a group of buyers you want to upsell them, mail them, whatever you can to squeeze out the pennies from their wallets.

So any time a new guru shit head product comes out, the PPC Classroom people get their customers to buy that shit so they can earn a handsome affiliate commission.

Inside source says: “So they made $700k from the Google Cash Detective Lanuch. Basically Amit hyped it for all he could and ALL the students bought into it. Well, obviously a month later when the students still hadn’t made any money they were all pissed…then Amit came out and was like…”oh you don’t really need that.”

It’s one big Guru circle jerk.

PPC Classroom had False Testimonials

Inside source says: On their latest launch they had fake testimonials. I think they took them down now but several of the testimonials were from the COACHES, not students of PPC Classroom. They (testimonials) said how Amit helped them earn millions, etc…just flat out lying.

They had a director of education who was basically in charge of teaching students and overseeing coaches and she had never done any affiliate marketing herself. I really don’t think he (Anik) is an affiliate. He doesn’t seem to know wtf he is doing except for wearing aligator shoes.

Nuff said?

PPC Classroom is Going Under – Not Paying Its Affiliates

This is the real story. The shit up there was just trash talking Amit. Don’t put yourself out there if you don’t want some blow-back. He’ll live.

The bigger story is about Anik Singal. Apparently he is not a popular cat.

The parent company of PPC Classroom is Lurn.com, and word on the street is that they are going under. The conversation below Is between Amit himself and our insider, talking about the their PPC Classroom woes.

Amit: Lurn is on the verge of bankruptcy. They haven’t paid affilaites since September, and now they’re delaying my payments.
Insider: What happened to the company?
Amit: I have no idea, but they screwed me by not paying affiliates. No one was motivated to promote PPC Classroom 3.0
Insider: I got a weird vibe from Anik when I met him, like he could be shady or something.
Amit: LOL. He’s not doing anything shady. He likes openly SCREWING People.
——-
Insider: Does he owe them (affiliates) a lot of money?
Amit: Yes. His company is cash strapped.
Insider: I’m surprised affiliates haven’t complained publicly about it yet. Maybe they will.
Amit: They stop promoting. Good thing you left when you did.
Insider: Did the company just grow too fast or did he just spend too much money?
Amit: spent WAY too much, and every launch after Feb PPC Classroom 2.0 BOMBED
Insider: lol what will happen to the other coaches? They gonna get paid?
Amit: I don’t know man. it’s BAD
Insider: That’s ugly ….
Amit (posting an email from PPC Classroom):

“Hi Amit, sorry I did not respond as we have been swamped after the holidays. You have been very patient with payments and we really appreciate it. As you know the market has sucked and things have really slowed.

We are working on new sales initiatives, which are already starting to help. However, we have a backlog of commissions (back to September) that have not been paid.

I am hoping that you can help us and be patient for 30 days or so so we can sort all of this out.

Things are improving every day but I would like to prioritize Affiliate payments for a while or our sales will decline further. Let me know if we need to talk about this more but I assure you there is no concern of not getting paid, we just are in catch up mode right now.”

Lessons Learned

Are there any lessons to learn here? I don’t fucking know.

One thing is for sure – if you are a newbie then you need to not fall for this shit. If you spend your hours and minutes anticipating the latest Guru info product, you’re going to be spinning in circles forever. The majority of these programs are straight-up, crocks of shit. None of this shit is going to make you rich retard.

And if you promote PPC Classroom you better stop cause you’re not going to get paid.

Another thing is that affiliate networks hate these guru products. They get flooded with a bunch of newb-tards that have no idea what they are doing. Not only that, but a bunch of fraud applications to deal with as well.

Game. Set. Match.

Many thanks to Pete for twittering the Festivus miracle that gave me the idea for this post.

Grab yourself a hot chocolate and a Snuggie, because this is a long one.

If you don’t know what Festivus is, let me explain. It is a very special holiday invented by the great Frank Costanza. It is celebrated on the 23rd of December. There is no need for decorated trees, because tinsel is distracting. There is no need for gift-giving – rather we air our grievances with the people who have disappointed us. There are many fine qualities to this so-called “Festivus for the rest of us,” which you may read here.

The Airing of Grievances

The Airing of Grievances is my favorite part of Festivus, and it is what this post is about. On Festivus, we gather those around us and let them know how they have disappointed us throughout the year.

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu, you have disappointed your friends and colleagues in more ways than one could ever count. You started the year off right – getting your face and brand out there and posting on any blog that would listen. You got more exposure faster than anyone I’ve seen in this space. For a moment, people thought you were legitimate.

But then you threw it all away when you sold out affiliate marketing on TechCrunch so you could get a few clicks to your local lead gen business.

Then the truth came out. People that dealt with Dennis came out of the woodwork and aired their own grievances about him. It was a glorious onslaught of complaints from underpaid and overworked employees, comical stories from advertisers that worked with him wondering how they got into this mess, and various tales from a random slew of people that have experience with Dennis.
In a matter of weeks, Yu’s reputation fell faster than the industry’s profit margins when the Government and Google came after Biz Opps and Grants.

For Dennis Yu, we are not thankful.

Idiots and Newbies

No matter how hard we try to deter you from making monies online, you keep coming. Like a flow of puss from an infected anus, you soil the once-good name of Wickedfire with your stupid questions and pointless posting.

What’s that? You heard John Chow makes $200K a year blogging about nothing – so you thought it would be a good idea to start your own blog and promote that shit stain everywhere? Or your heard some guru thuper affiliate makes $xx,xxx in X amount of time, so you thought you’d play your hand (but you can only do it if you request everyone’s landing pages, traffic sources, how long the campaigns lasts, day parting schedule, what they eat for breakfast, how often they go to the gym, when they change their underwear….)

Everyone was a newbie at some point in time – but most kept their fucking mouth shut and learned by doing. The failures are the ones that gave up when they didn’t get a handout.

For idiots and newbies, we are not thankful.

Sell Outs

Every time some network, service, or whatever the fuck have you wants some exposure – they go to the usual suspects. You know, those popular bloggers that will post about anything to their unsuspecting readers for oh, I don’t know – $100? But do these bloggers actually test the products, or do their due-diligence on the networks they are promoting? Fuck no.

First off, no one has the time to go through all the shit that’s out there to give an honest opinion or review. The shit just takes too long, because like, real journalism and research is time-intensive. Second off, it’s more about a few hundred bucks from a blog post than actually providing real and honest information to their readers. If the blogger can make money off of it, the shit is probably going to get a favorable review.

I’ve tried so hard to sell out. Really, all year I’ve thought about how to monetize PPC.bz. But I just can’t do it. You sell out once and the product or company turns out to be shitty (which is usually the case), then your whole reputation goes down the fucking drain.

PPC.bz is a labor of love. You think these long-ass posts are delivered on a USB drive by unicorns? Fuck no, they take hours to write. Hours.

I’ve thought about charging these networks for the banner space on the right, but I’ve decided that it’s not worth the few hundred bucks a month. Those banners are up there because I like the people – not because they are the best networks (although they will say otherwise)(by the way, there is no such thing as the best network, so stop looking. It’s about what network works for you)

The only thing I’ve sold out with is Ubot, because it’s a quality product. I would’ve sold out to a few other products, like WFReview, but just couldn’t find the time. That’s it though. A few products out of the hundreds that are released all fucking year are worth writing about.

There is no point to posting a product’s sales sheet. If you can’t show how the product makes you money then what is the fucking point?

What does that say about the integrity of the other blogs out there? The sad part is, if your blog gets popular then it can still help you in this industry, no matter how shitty it is. Integrity and journalism are either dying, or were never there. We’re no New York Times (we’re not even a New York Chronicle dot org!), but if you read carefully there is usually underlying truth to the long posts on PPC.bz. Behind the laughs and rhymes, the truth will set you free.

For sell outs, we are not thankful.

Greedy Advertisers

What’s wrong with the continuity model? Nothing.

Somebody wants a product for free, they can just pay shipping. If they do not like the product, they can cancel it. Netflix does it, Gunthey Runker does it, and many companies do it well and have done it for a long time. You don’t have to be a big company to do it well either. A friend of mine slangs his product with this model in a very competitive space – but as soon as someone complains or wants to cancel they’re gone. Why bother? Just make the money off the people who want the product (whether it works or not) or are too lazy to cancel. Margins are slimmer, but it’s safer with less heat on him.

So what happens when you make it really difficult to cancel? What happens when you nick someone for $150+ with forced upsells if they don’t cancel their trial product – instead of a measly $39-50? What happens if you deliver an absolutely shitty product (i.e; nothing) that no one would ever pay for, let alone $100+. What happens when you pull this shit on millions of people? What happens when you rip-off the likeness of the biggest name in show business (Oprah), or when you rip off the name of a competing product (DazzleWhite). What the fuck did you think was going to happen?

Let’s look past the money. Let’s look past one man making $100 million plus money, and past the handful of affiliates and networks that became millionaires from the “smash and grab” model. (I call it “smash and grab” because once they have the person’s billing info on the file – they are raiding it for as much as they possibly can without getting caught)

It’s greed plain and simple. It’s on the level of Bernie Maddoff Ponzi Scheme greed. Wall Street greed. This kind of greed gets public backlash. The kind of attention we don’t need. Maybe that’s too greedy. It’s more on the level of greed when banks double-dip, when you pay the $x fee for a non-branch ATM then pay it again within your own bank. It doesn’t kill anyone, but everyone hates it and they are working on laws to prevent it.

Don’t get me wrong – most of us have benefited. But we all knew it wasn’t going to last. Let’s at least have a common enemy. The one guy who took it too far and who everyone followed because that’s where the highest payouts were.

We’ll call this man Messy Millms. Here’s a video about him. Watch it, because it’s important.

Before going any further, let’s look at this guy’s positive PR campaign. Some unsuspecting government official hears the name, looks it up in Search, and sees some positive looking results. The government official or lawyer or whatever looks for another target.

But if you look closer, you’ll see some of these search results are a little… queer. Not gay queer, but odd queer like they would say in the 19th century. They look… familiar. Flogging familiar.

http://www.truthaboutjessewillms.com/
http://www.jessewillmsscams.com/
http://www.jessewillmsethics.com/

It’s plain as day this guy took it too far. Some might respect him because of all the money he made. I disagree. There’s a certain point where the shadyiness of the scam outweighs the respect of being able to acquire great wealth. Shit, people made money off stealing gold from Jews during the Holocaust, and they’ll rot in hell. (This is an intense analogy, I know, but remember – “Behind every great fortune, is a great crime.”)

Here’s the backlash, for him and for the rest of the industry.

Oprah is going to fuck this guy. Watch the video again. Because of Willm’s resources, they will probably fight in court for months if not years. Oprah will settle and it will cost Willms millions, but he will go on, business as usual.

But add on the Dazzle White lawsuit. He straight up jacked a company’s brand. There are serious fucking charges in this lawsuit. He may survive the Oprah suit, but chances are he won’t fare so well in this one.

Let’s not forget government involvement. This is something you don’t want in your industry. But the greed got so bad they had to do something. Customers are stupid. Now we have new guidelines, rules, and all that bullshit. Is affiliate marketing dead? Absolutely not. You just have to tread more carefully.

Google is shitting on the industry just as hard as anyone else. While you can’t attribute what Google is doing directly to Willms, the “smash and grab” attitude certainly has something to do with it. Now an affiliate can’t get on Google if they were promoting clothing for nuns. (Not to mention the 50 “John Does” about to get fucked by Google)

The credit card companies are pissed too. Visa and Mastercard don’t want to deal with the millions of customers getting ripped off by the insanely greedy antics of these companies. They are going all over the world, shutting down the merchants and processors that do business with companies like Willms’. (Willms’ network of offshore and shell corporations is so thick you need some Crocodile Dundee knife to cut through it)

The problem is that so many legitimate advertisers get fucked when this happens. Mention you sell diet pills (no matter how legitimately) and you are scrutinized worse than an airport security cavity search.

Everyone is now painted with the same brush. – isn’t that ironic?

When people say this industry needs self-regulation, this is what they mean. It cannot get so fucking bad that the biggest companies in the world, biggest names in show business, the government, etc etc get involved. We can all make money but there will always be a few individuals that push the envelope until it breaks. And most are forced to follow because you can’t compete being 100% straight.

So when does the self-regulation happen? It won’t. The cycle will keep going. Greed happens, and then regulation happens. People figure out how to get around regulation, and then more greed happens. These are simply the economic forces greater than any one individual or company can ever change. Self-regulation is a pipe dream. Is it bad or good? It’s simply capitalism.

The only institution able to change market forces is Government, and look where we are heading. Wall Street fucked society 100 times worse than any affiliate could, and it needs regulation just like our industry. But Wall Street has power, connections to government, and all that jazz. Affiliate marketing is the Wild West, a bunch of cowboys that can really be wiped out with a few laws being passed.

Will Willms have to go bankrupt and end up in jail for the charges he is accused of? Who knows. But they have to make an example out of somebody. Whether its an individual or a whole industry – only time will tell.

For greedy advertisers, we are not thankful.

Don’t forget to donate to charity. I prefer this one.