I cry a sad tear about this.

Over the years I've heard affiliates ask why increased government intervention in our biz would be a bad things (i.e. let the government catch the bad players). Then answer to that is 1) the industry-wide bad PR and 2) lots of babies get thrown out in the bath water

It's a sphinctor tightening experience when the government descends upon you.

I think as an industry there is still a lot of room for us to improve our own internal quality control.

“But online shoppers need to know that the Office of the Attorney General has charged multiple Web sites with unlawfully promising unbiased rankings while secretly accepting undisclosed payments for inflating sellers’ online ratings. “

It seems what was presented as consumer-based ratings were really paid for.

I agree with Scott that there are probably a good number of publishers doing this (or at least providing what appears to be consumer ratings but aren't really) & they should do a serious risk assessment when engaging in the practice.

I know I've gone to I don't know how many affiliate sites and seen all merchants with a 5-star rating. Not just on shopping comparison sites either, but coupon sites and others.

I'll see if I can get access to the court documents filed..maybe there are some screen shots are such of the sites to get a better idea of what exactly was happening on the sites.

I guess short-sighted is more in line with their behavior.

> The scum push the limits and raises the ire of consumers and government. But once they start looking, how far does it go.

That's the crappy part – we can perform above board, and then we'll have to digest all of the regulations, because of these clowns.

It starts with matching color schemes with adsense ads, making them blend with the site. The disclosure that ads are ads starts to become diminished. The word “Advertisement” becomes fainter and fades into the background. CTR goes up. More testing, words like “best price” is used, CTR goes up. At some point it crosses this blurry line into “misleading”.

The scum push the limits and raises the ire of consumers and government. But once they start looking, how far does it go.

Scary if you ask me.

Nice that they just took down some offenders in this case, rather than a CAN-SPAM approach that missed the bums and made things more burdensome for legitimate marketers.