Affiliate Disclosures and the FTC, Do I Need One?
According to the rules laid down by the FTC, there is a requirement that you need a page disclosing the fact that you are compensated in some way for the content you write about.
I live in the UK and I have Privacy Policy, Website Disclamer, Contact Me Page, 404 Error Page and a Site Map on most of my sites.
Now it seems I have to have an Affiliate Disclosure because several of the sites I own or are jointly owned have a .com at the end of the domain name.
This does not seem to be the case.
It is purely down to you making money via a commission payment after your visitor has read your review or post.
This is the only reason I can see for having one.
This is what the FTC say about certain aspects of the Affiliate Disclosure.
You can check this page out for yourself;
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-endorsement-guideswhat-people-are-asking
But here is what I think is more relevant.
1. There is no fine for not complying with an FTC guide.
2. We’re not monitoring bloggers and we have no plans to. If concerns about possible violations of the FTC Act come to our attention, we’ll evaluate them case by case. If law enforcement becomes necessary, our focus will be advertisers, not endorsers – just as it’s always been.
Also on the that same page it clearly says that you should not need to pay for a Disclosure to be created for you.
Plus it should not necessarily be a separate page stuck in the sidebar mixed in with the rest of the Pages.
But should be in plain view on every Post or Page that has a link on where you are likely to be paid a commission.
That is the important bit above.
How do I do this then?
There is a plugin that can add custom text into your Footer.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-post-footer/
And you could say something like this;
(Note: I got this from somewhere else and did not create it)
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s
16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials.”
But the one I really like which you could just copy and paste into any page or post as you are creating them is this;
Affiliate Disclosure - I am an Affiliate of many products promoted on this website and may earn a commission if you purchase something.
You can alter that to how you want but if that Post has an Affliate Link on then it should have a short sentence informing your readers.
If you have other posts which don't have any affiliate links in then you do not require a confession.
My Conclusion
I am not going to bother with the separate page or add yet another plugin.
I will just stick to the simple and plain message at the end of my Posts, which according to the FTC is sufficient.
Cheers
Neil
Recent Comments
12
Thanks for the info Neil. I was a bit worried that I have not an affiliate disclosure page on my site as yet, and I was in the process of modifying one to publish.
A disclaimer at the end of the post is probably not going to be sufficient if there are affiliate links before the disclaimer. The FTC takes the position that since someone might click the link before they get to the disclaimer (especially if they'd have to scroll down to see it), they might not see the disclaimer. Here's a pretty good summary (in my opinion):
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ftc-2013-disclosures/
I wasn't sure if it had to be on every page or not. I got it now thanks for the input Neil, it was very helpful.
How do you reckon this would work if you don't put any affiliate links in your posts, but just have say a ''shop'' of affiliate items. That's how I'm planning o doing mine, - and possibly not all of them will even be affiiates, it would just be a mish-mash of products fulfulling my users' criteria, they can choose what the hell they like. So would I just put the disclaimer in the shop part?
Sometimes, we as bloggers do cross the line and promote every jack and Jill from the market. I think, the Affiliate Disclosure wouldn't do any harm for us.
I can see where they are coming from with this but this has been around for years.
I just don't understand why they have to be such a pain with it.
See more comments
Good post, Neil. What about ads? What's the maximum number of ads to use in a post without AdSense?
Hi, There are several ways to look at this. Google doesn't like a post flooded with ads and that can affect your rankings. I've just written a post that could potentially have had ads to a number of products but I didn't want to do that. So, I talked about the products and then created one ad that would help people to find all of them that included my affiliate link. At most, I have two add links on a post, some folks use more. A way you could test this is to ask for site comments in Need website comments? the give and take comment thread and specify that you want people to look at your ads. Hope this helps
Steve C
Hi madybilg, I keep my ads between 4 and 6, depending on the post. Jay has a video on this and the best places to insert your ads.
Best wishes,
Michael