As has been the case for the last couple of years, there is substantial debate going on about how affiliates are able to make money from social media. Various parties have tried to monetise Facebook with limited success and the growth of Twitter has lead to discussion around how to make the most of the huge growth it has seen.
One interesting upshot of this was brought to light on eConsultancy last week by Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia. The new generation of URL shorteners which, instead of directing the user straight to a site, wrap the destination site in a frame. You may be familiar with this if you’ve clicked on shortlinks in Twitter, but if not here is this site if shortened with Digg. There are also versions from companies like Hootsuite, a Twitter management tool, and rumours that major player Stumbled Upon are aboout to release something similar.
Andrew highlights the issues with analytics, with the referrer being the URL shortener, eg Digg, rather than the site the user clicked the link upon. He also raises the point that SEO will be harmed, with link juice not being passed on as well with the use of URL shorteners.
Both very valid points and worthy of further debate, but on the affiliate side of things will this affect us?
Somewhat worrying from a merchant’s point of view. As mentioned above, this method obscures the referring URL meaning that transparency is reduced. I think it is vital that merchants have visibility of where and how affiliates are promoting them and clouding this, deliberately or not, can lead to confusion and mistrust.
Secondly, not good for affiliates either. When clicking through a shortURL which contains an affiliate link, when you open the link, the wrapped window will display the affiliate link rather than the destination URL. Take this example for Borders – http://ow.ly/2O33. Clicking on this, the frame shows the URL as http://www.awin1.com/a…. Punters not completely familiar with the whole affiliate tracking model (ie 99.9% of the population) may well be confused by this and see it as akin to a bank card phishing scam.
So what do we do about this? Should merchants try and prevent affiliates using these framed shortURL’s? Would affiliates want to use them anyway? My personal view is that we should probably try and stay away. A lot of merchants, networks, agencies and affiliates are driving towards greater transparency and this is something that pushes us away from that goal.
As ever, interested to hear everyone elses views (and don’t forget to back me)…
