Site Ethics

December 18th, 2005 · No Comments

I wish more sites would explicitly declare their ethical standards. It would make judging their worth so much easier. Is this site living up to its ethics? Do I even agree with them in the first place?

I had to clarify and write out my website ethics for myself when I was first putting ads on Invisible Castle. That site gets a few thousand hits a day, and has been completely ad-free up to now. Chitika, for some reason, decided that the site did not meet their standards to be an affiliate. So, I decided to sign up “manually” to be an affiliate using one of the many affiliate aggregation sites. The first one I tried was ClickBank, and that’s what caused the ethical dilemma. Simple searches quickly revealed that while ClickBank itself was fairly likely to pay legitimate affiliate commissions, the programs themselves were highly suspect. In fact, the top ten on the popular/hot list were all obvious, easily verified scams. Ick.

The money is tempting, I suppose. But I just cannot support scammers. I am instead advertising through Commission Junction. I’ve selected three game companies I respect and signed up as an affiliate with them, all with a clean conscience.

My simple ethical rules for this site:

Honesty - I won’t lie in postings, and I wont have advertisers that I would not personally use. I won’t review something highly just to drive sales.

Making money is OK, so long as it is up-front - I will attempt to make this site profitable, and I won’t hold back on that. That means for example, that if I mention a book, I’m going to put an Amazon affiliate tag on it. However, see the honesty entry.

The site will be accessible to the best of my ability. I will make it usable for blind or vision-impaired readers. These people are under-served or served as an afterthought far too often.

Technorati Tags: ethics, Chitika, affiliate