The FTC is one of those evil deep state entities that you hear about on right wing news stations.
During the Obama Administration, the FTC set out to destroy the affiliate industry by requiring that web sites put a huge warning next to all affiliate links warning the public that the link is an affiliate link.
The FTC warning is supposed to be bold and preferably has a yellow background. It is supposed to be positioned before the link occurs.
I am breaking the law. I put the FTC warning in the middle of the page. To limit the size of the FTC block, I use as font that is a step smaller than the main font.
I showed a page with my FTC warning.
Predictably, the person did not want to click on the link. This is predictable. There is a huge FTC warning telling the person not to click on the link.
The user typed the name of the business into the address bar. This brought up the google search page. The person then clicked on the Google ad for the merchant.
Because I am required to put an ugly FTC warning on my page, the traffic that I am generating is being credited to Google.
So, what I did yesterday is I updated the code for my FTC warning to include the direct URL for the merchant.
This way if a reader is horrified by the possibly that I might possibly benefit from a web page that I created, then they can click on the direct link. This will cut my site out of the commission chain.
This change took a full day to implement as I had to make sure I had the correct URL for the 400 affiliates that I currently list. It took all day to check 400 urls.
Here is the current FTC warning design. A site called Artwanted has an affiliate program. This is my affiliate link www.ArtWanted.com/?RID=10452 . The RID is a unique identifier for me. My FTC Warning has a link with out the id.
If you are a progressive and are incensed at the possibility that I might receive a financial return for creating a web page; you can indignantly click on the tag free link in the FTC warning. How cool is that?
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