Copyblogger points to an article that indicates that Affiliate Marketing Disclosure may become Mandatory by law. This will be a fascinating one to watch and could have implications for bloggers on many levels.
The article states:
“The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships….
Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.”
Questions it leaves me with include:
- How they’ll police it?
- Whether this will only apply to US bloggers (I’m presuming so)?
- How it will impact sites that have many tens thousands of pages with deep link affiliate promotions already in their archives? Will it be retrospective?
- how they’ll define what is and isn’t a disclosure?
There’s more on this over at Tony Hung’s blog.
Don’t know what Affiliate Marketing is? Read What is Affiliate Marketing?
