I have been thinking about why Fairfax would allow an affiliate marketing campaign to run which specifically targets my 3loves free online dating website. (3loves is one of several sites we have launched to provide, in part, newsagents with access to some revenue from online advertising.)
While it is possible that Fairfax would not have known that an affiliate of Commission Monster – the affiliate services provider engaged by Fairfax – was running such a campaign, they ought to have known. Any business would want to know how their brand is represented in an advertising mix. Or, they ought to.
Anyway, why would Fairfax let this happen because it did happen, for at least two months? Not just to us but to a range of other tiny and not so tiny online dating sites. All these competitors of RSVP were targeted in a marketing campaign which was designed to move traffic to Fairfax’s RSVP site.
Profit is the answer. RSVP is highly profitable for Fairfax. It’s Australia’s largest online dating / personals site. Based on membership numbers and the charges for using some services on the site I’d suggest it is likely to be among the most profitable and therefore important to the Fairfax bottom line.
3loves is free. What RSVP charges for we offer free. We will always be free. 3loves exists to provide is a platform at which we can advertise Find It, our online classifieds site.
Even though 3loves is minuscule compared to RSVP, it must pose a risk. Why else would someone, either inside Fairfax, inside Commission Monster or elsewhere, specifically target 3loves? There is no reason other than a view that we, at some point, are a threat to RSVP.
What the last week has proven is the scams than are being used in the name of major brands, with their knowledge or without, in an effort to screw with Google, Yahoo and other search results. Some activities are outright scams. Others are done under the name of Search Engine Optimisation or as one could call it – Scam Everyone Online.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What you call it doesnt really matter. Search Engine Optimisation or a scam, if they cross the line of their operation being legitimatly legal then other issues come into play.
Of course internet related law is still young and as such is not fully developed. But i still question the legal legitimacy of activities such as this. Not only is it marketing that is designed specifically to mislead consumers, it is (in some cases) using domain names (among other things) to lead consumers to their site. How is this any different from someone trying to use an almost identical brand name to one that is already extremely prominent in the marketplace, specifiaclly to mislead consumers?
Call it what you want, it still smells rotten to me.
Came across meaning of SEOPRO, pretty sure it stands for Search Engine Optimization Promotion or similar, like you said it came from inside fairfax probably from one of their service providers that they use for their web services.