Once acai berry died out (damn you Oprah! lol) you saw a big shift toward teeth whitening and work at home flogs (“fake blogs”).
It’s always been possible to buy TONS of traffic for these but you saw most marketers having to be a little “creative” with how they get the landing page past quality filters and manual reviews. ‘Think cookie cloaking and other forms of content replacement.
And that’s why it shocks me – tongue firmly in cheek – that the new lily white ‘do no evil’ uber-monster of the internet Facebook is allowing direct linking to flog. Especially one doing nasty things like geotargeting me in order to increase conversion.
You can check out the ConsumerWorkJournal landing page by clicking here.
(this isn’t new – the porn folks have been doing this for ages)
The cynical out there will point out that it is the 4th quarter and nothing motivates an advertising platform more than holiday spending and a depressed economy.
Now YOU don’t have to make a flog in order to cash in on this. But it’s nice to see how low the floor really is with FB right now.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
You would think that if they were going whole hog with the geotargeting thing that the weather forecast would also target my location and not Buffalo New York.
Oh well, good college try.
Dave
what? Boise and Buffalo don’t get the same weather?
They don’t allow this, this is just one of them who had successfully sneak one of his ads in (they submit thousands to get one through)… his account will be terminated if FB catches this. But it’s probably worth it because you can spend up to $10K/day with ads like this.
I don’t know… I was 3 for 3 with a flog style page. I didn’t make up the blog comments but the landing page style was basically the same advertorial layout. One was in the “work from home” category.
I hear what you’re saying Zack but things seem to have slacked just a little at the FB HQ. It’s more than possible that this one was cloaking and taking out some of the more offensive giveaways.
Let’s see if I get slapped in a week.
That said, I have basically no luck with anything direct response related in the diet market on FB. There things are still highly regulated in my experience. Fitness is much easier.
I believe that eventually Facebook will drop the hammer on all the affiliates that use flogs. It does their business absolutely no good to allow them.
As for the affiliates that use flogs, they are bottom of the barrel “scum.” And every legitimate affiliate who is trying to build a “real” business should be pissed at these guys. Flog marketers give our business a bad name and they create jaded customers who are less likely to buy then they see a “legitimate” offer down the road.
The good news is that flog marketers are not building their business on a rock-solid foundation. They are not building a long-term business. Eventually, what they are building will tumble like a house of cards.
The idea of deceiving people with a flog makes me wonder how these guys sleep at night.
Jon Poland