It must be everyones nightmare. A giant institution finds something they don’t like about your advertising and picks a fight. This happened to a company I worked for more than ten years ago. The dust is long settled so I thought it could be a good example of how affiliates can be an asset and a risk, often at the same time.
Background
In around 2010 I went to work with a marketing company who sold “health and wellbeing” supplements. They knew me from my time at a leading affiliate network and as they were growing fast they asked me to help scale up their ability to accept and process payments.
I am not going to write the name of the business because they are still a going concern and it wouldn’t be fair if this article ranked for their brand name in search engines. The name is mentioned in the audio clip embedded below if you’re interested.
So what was the product? Don’t laugh… but it was teabags. Diet teabags. Not just a few teabags either; they were selling millions of pounds worth of teabags every month.
It was a freemium product linked to a subscription plan – customers were tempted in by the generous free trial and paid a subscription if they didn’t cancel.
The business model was directly imported from a successful operation in the US, and nearly 100% of tehir sales came from from affiliates. I was surprised at how much they were selling. I can’t say I believed in the product, but I was passionate about not starving to death so I took the job.
The key to their (apparent) success was their choice of marketing partner. They had flirted with most of the well known UK affiliate networks without much success before one specific partner took off in spectacular fashion.
Products like this were and still are the staple of lots of affiliate networks across the globe. The product being sold has moved with the times but it is still very much an active industry. Nowadays offers like this are called “nutra”, and it’s still a huge industry.
I want to point out that at the time this company was no better or worse than many others in the same space. Accusations like “they hide it in the small print” just weren’t true. Warnings and descriptions of the subscription model were prominent across the entire website. Consumers were so driven by receiving a free product that they just ignored them. However, it was very hard to cancel the free trial, and a lot of unhappy customers received subscription charges they were not expecting.
I hasten to add that I was not managing this affiliate program – I was working on rolling out new payment options as their “chief techy”.
A Bad Day.
On a lovely sunny afternoon I was called into the MDs office. “Steve, can you record a BBC Radio Show on the computer thingy?”. Erm, yes, probably. Why?… “let’s just listen to it first”…
I wasn’t concerned. A competitor had recently caused a stir with adverts that blurred the lines between advert and editorial content so I thought it would be mainly about them. Sadly not. The BBC had decided that our company was a bunch of Gangsters, and dedicated a serious chunk of time to make sure everyone knew how naughty we were.
Want to listen? Here it is. It is the first item on the show (1:10) and it lasts about 10 minutes.
If you don’t have time to listen here are some highlights:

A successful fraud relies on winning the trust of your victims. So, hijacking a trusted brand a trusted brand is perfect if you can get away with it. It so happens that one of the BBCs most trusted brands, the BBC news website, has been cloned for fraud.
This was news to us. You can imagine how we felt in the office. It got worse:

…they are fraudsters and they are committing criminal offences.
Just in case listeners hadn’t got the message:

This is straight fraud isn’t it, there is no doubt about it?
Absolutely
This was the most damaging statement in my opinion. Without any chance to reply, a senior Police officer had just said “no doubt about it, they are guilty”. Wow. It went on and on and on. At this point I was mentally updating my CV (best case) and wondering how I’d survive in prison (worst case).
They even advised existing and previous customers to call Action Fraud because their credit card details were at risk. Apparently we weren’t just doing some risky marketing, we were actively stealing payment details for criminal purposes. In 10 minutes, equipped with incorrect information and a bit of self righteousness they tried very hard to ruin the business.
So what actually happened?
You have probably guessed by now, but the activity which caused all the fuss wasn’t directly done by the merchant. It was an affiliate. Or to be accurate, several affiliates.
This was made possible because the merchant used a blind affiliate network. With these networks the merchant makes an offer available to the network, and they promote it using their network of affiliates.
When you use a blind network you don’t know who your affiliates are. You simply purchase traffic and sales from the network. They are responsible for policing the affiliates and making sure they follow the rules. The BBC identified that the publisher or at least their website was based in California – that was actually more than we knew about them. It did make sense based on what we learned later.
One specific publisher had purchased millions of pop-up and pop-under adverts displaying a fake web page that was a blatant copy of the BBC Health website. They had broken every rule that had been set for them prohibiting doctors recommendations, fake endorsements and more. Someone from the BBC saw one of these ads, and the rest is history.
As the radio show notes, the affiliate subtly changed the “BBC” logo to “BBG”, but that didn’t make the site any less illegal. The actual content on the page contained glowing recommendations and promises of massive weight loss, all verified by a legion of made up doctors.
The BBC had spotted one advert but we soon realised that the entire affiliate program had become lawless. Digging deeper, most of the sales came from incredibly aggressive, misleading and risky paid media activity. Pop-unders, malware, misleading content… if it could be used to promote the product then someone somewhere was probably doing it.
The reason it went so badly was because the terms of the affiliate program were so lucrative. Affiliates could earn up to £80 for referring a single customer to receive a “free” product.
It attracted a lot of affiliates and encouraged the network to let them do whatever they wanted. You see the same effect on lower quality affiliate networks like Clickbank – top performing affiliate offers can be worth millions of dollars, so affiliates resort to more and more dubious methods to get a slice of the pie.
When the program was identified as one of these valuable opportunities the American owners of the blind network took a closer interest. More aggressive publishers from the American market were recruited to increase performance further. They even shipped a new team of account managers across the pond to replace the UK based team.
Later that afternoon…
As Aunty Beeb promised, the domain name and web hosting for the website were suspended at the same time as the radio show. I got everything back online within two hours.
That is one of the strengths of businesses using the affiliate model – especially when nearly 100% of the traffic comes from affiliates. The main asset is traffic, and that can be directed anywhere you like. In this respect we were quite lucky – websites are easy to replace. If they had attacked the payment and banking facilities that would have been much harder to restore.
I simply published a staging website using a spare domain name and asked the affiliate network to update their links to point to the new website address. Shortly after all the banners and links sprang back to to life and the sales machine carried on. It was actually quite a good day for sales.
Was that the right thing to do? In hindsight, perhaps not. Not because it risked upsetting the BBC – we were still furious so we were quite pleased to stick one to them. However, it also meant continuing to work with the network and affiliates who caused the issues in the first place.
After I got everything back online we were called back into the office. The MD seemed happy. “Great news chaps. We don’t need to sell teabags any more. We’re going to sue the BBC.”
Shortly after, I resigned.
The Fallout
- That particular episode of the radio show was removed from the BBC archives pretty quickly. The promised follow up never happened.
- The company didn’t get taken down. To the best of my knowledge the threats of prosecution never really materialised.
- The focus quickly moved from the BBC and the police to the role the blind affiliate network played. They were responsible for managing and encouraging the rogue affiliates and had really let the merchant down.
- Changing the domain name for the brand had very little impact. The temporary domain I activated 15 years ago is still in use as the main url for the business.
- The blind network ceased trading soon after.
The company changed direction. One benefit of all the frantic affiliate coverage was that it drove customers to established websites like Holland and Barrett to research the product. One retailer in particular was receiving thousands of searches every day, despite not even selling it. Good retailers do monitor this, and now the product is available in a lot of reputable high street stores.
Things I don’t know
As you would expect the lawyers got involved and legal broadsides were fired in a range of directions. I don’t know any of the legal outcomes because by that point I had left the business.
Pretty soon afterwards the blind network which was responsible closed down. However, a lot of the staff and some of their old clients popped up at a new network doing the same thing.
I have bumped into a few of them over the years and they told me said the network simply declared bankruptcy to clean the slate and resumed operating under a new name with their best staff and most lucrative clients.
I think it is safe to say that eventually the merchant ‘won’, whatever that means. The police and the BBC backed off, the slanderous radio show was removed from from publication, and I didn’t spend my 30th birthday in the clink.
To the best of my knowledge the individual publishers were not held accountable. They probably lost any unpaid commission from pending sales, but that is usually the extent of their punishment. The networks which encourage such practices tend to pay very regularly – weekly or even daily, so it is unlikely that they felt too much pain. While there have been some instances where large brands like ebay or Amazon prosecuted fraudulent affiliates, that is few and far between, and the involvement of third parties muddies the water further.
Luckily all the negative attention didn’t end the business completely, but their main source of customers was now gone and they had to start from scratch. Checking in a year later, everything had changed. The freemium subscription model had been scrapped the product range had expanded to include coffee and diet pills, and their products were now available in popular high street stores. Since then I believe the business has changed ownership at least once and is now much more retail focussed. The prices are still very high though.
Whose fault was it?
In my opinion most of the buck stops with the people executing the affiliate program, (the blind network), but there was a lot of blame to go around.
- The police / BBC got it very wrong. They didn’t do enough research and went off half cocked. Whoever allowed the story to be published on the radio really didn’t do them any favours. Ironically, while the naughty affiliates felt the BBC name carried weight and authority, the police fell into the same trap and didn’t do their due diligence.
- The affiliate network quite simply encouraged the activity to make as much money as possible.
- The merchant was quite happy accepting the sales. They could have ridden the network harder, but that’s hard to justify when money is just flooding in.
In truth the ‘freemium’ business plan relied on treading the thin line between following the rules to the letter and making pots of money.
The network had definitely been told what the boundaries were. They were to avoid fake testimonials, fake brand names, fake endorsements (like the BBC) and especially claims like “verified by doctors”. While I wasn’t directly involved with the affiliate management, I definitely let them know when I spotted problematic content, as did all of my colleagues.
Thoughts and learnings
You can decide who was responsible yourself, but this whole situation happened because everyone – the merchant, network and affiliates – benefited from simply passing responsibility down the chain. The group who ultimately paid the price were the customers – they were mis-sold expensive and ineffective products.
Nowadays I firmly stay in the mainstream affiliate market, but that doesn’t mean dodgy publishers will stay in their lane. You need to be aware that a lot of affiliates are happy to bend or break the rules if they think they’ll get away with it. Blind networks or subnetworks make that much easier.
As soon as you give up control or visibility over what affiliates do the risk increases exponentially.
I learned a few things that have shaped how I manage affiliate programs today.
- The average layman, even “fraud specialists” and the police just don’t know what affiliates are. They are likely to hold the merchant responsible for whatever they see.
- In this case there just wasn’t enough control over the program. The sector we are talking about has always had quite a flexible relationship with the rules, but in this case they lost control altogether.
- “Blind” networks can enable and amplify this sort of risk.
- Knowledge of the local market is key. The blind network was led from the US, which has different standards and conventions.
- Don’t use paid sources for testimonials for your product or site. While the idea of purchasing testimonials is to protect you from harm and provide positive content, in truth they often do the opposite. The BBC picked up on it and they were dead right – the reviews for the brand were nonsense.
- Affiliates often think they are being clever by doing things like changing the “BBC” logo to “BBG”. Silly things like this just make it easier to identify and catch them. Long may it continue…
The most important lesson
The most important thing in e-commerce is the ability to sell your product and receive the money.
That might not feel like something an affiliate manager should worry about, but a rogue affiliate can easily put this at risk. What if the BBC or the police had managed to freeze the bank accounts or asked VISA to block future payments?
I was able to restore the website in short order, but I can’t pull new banking facilities out of a hat. That would have been game over.
Sub-networks
So far we have been talking about dodgy affiliates in a portion of the industry that is known for being quite ruthless and dodgy. There is, however, a relatively new type of affiliate you need to be aware of. They can introduce some of these weaknesses to any program, regardless of what they sell.
Some affiliates operate Sub-networks. You accept one publisher on to your program and they distribute your link to their own network. Well known (and trustworthy) sub-networks include Skimlinks and Viglink.
Like blind affiliate networks, you can’t always see who is promoting you. You have a relationship with the owner of the sub network (because they are your affiliate), but not their publishers.
There are a few main types of sub network:
- Technology / link rewriting
Services like SkimLinks and VigLink provide a snippet of code that turns any normal link on a website on a page into an affiliate link. It is very useful to monetise forums and other user generated content.
The better ones do provide an interface to mange your sub affiliates, but access is limited – you may be charged for access, or it may only be available for larger partners. - Blog / content networks
Some publishers claim to provide links or deals to a network of dozens or hundreds of websites who wouldn’t apply to your program individually. The promotion methods they use vary a lot – but banner ads are common. - Psuedo-networks
Some publishers repackage programs from other networks into their own offering. They are in effect pretending to be a complete affiliate network. Behind the scenes they are closer to cashback sites, and they use the same technology (clickrefs) to pay the correct member / sub-affiliate.
What do I need to keep an eye out for?
As a rule sub most networks are fine to work with. With the exception of a few psuedo-networks who are very easy to spot, they largely just provide the service they say and don’t push the boundaries. However, it is relatively easy for a few bad players to hide within a sub network.
For example, some publishers use sub networks to get access to working affiliate links after they have had an affiliate application rejected.
Most of these affiliates do offer a suite of tools to manage who can promote you, but they aren’t always available to everyone. Some only allow their largest merchants to use them, while others charge for access. If you can get access to these tools you really should.