This will take away room from the bad things and before you know it, the BAD THINGS will be nothing more than a FOOTNOTE, so MARGINAL that it barely requires your attention at all in your everyday life/business.

Our industry needs to be focused on quality… NOT quantity and all work together to flush out the people that do not ad to the growth and expansion of the industry.

It is critical. Especially right now. the economy is shining a light on our performance marketing segment of the market. We have very big brands looking at how to enter performance marketing. Some tried before and had a bad experience. If we focus on providing best of breed solutions and programs we could see an enormous chunk of budget come this way and grow the pie!!!!

Some call it being blunt, others call it stupid, but I just call it “being the real me, no fake, no acting.”

It’s also not as hard as some people think it is.

It also has an advantage, which is hard to beat … … it’s natural and feels right. I encourage anybody to try it for themselves. Maybe you get a kick out of it too.

You have to accept the consequences of it of course, the good and the bad. But you do not have to worry about the bad ones, since the good ones should be overwhelmingly exceed the bad ones, except if you are an asshole… by heart

This hunting down of bad players is nothing more than a witch hunt and the hunters in a witch hunt tend to become not much different from their prey, because that is what you need to do in order to become a good hunter.

You have to know your prey, what it does, what it thinks, what it feels.

As I also pointed out already, is all this very vulnerable for corruption and manipulation. It also tends to bring out the worst in people. It encourages and leverages denunciation, betrayal and black mail. That’s not very nice stuff to build your foundation upon. Look at the Paid Links issue and Google and you will see what I am talking about. I don’t want to trigger Godwin’s law here, but we all know that those principles are the seed and heart of societies that ended in world conflict and genocide.

That’s why I don’t like it. And there are alternatives. It is not like that you have to go through all this nasty stuff in order to change things… you probably know that I was raised in East Germany. They tried to teach me, that the only way to change things are radical revolutions with a lot of ugly stuff that you must endure and do in order to achieve the ultimate goal where everything will be good and nobody will have to suffer ever again. That is a myth… a persistent one I might add.

The alternative is the PRO approach. Do the right thing yourself, encourage others to do the same thing and highlight individuals and entities that were going the extra mile without being forced to do so, but because they thought that it would be the right thing to do.

People in the grey area will have to make a choice eventually, because they exclude themselves from the rest of the people. That will hurt them at their bottom line. Playing snake and planting mistrust and fear won’t work, because it is not the foundation where this approach is based on in order to work. Nobody will force anybody to JOIN or to follow. Actually things like active involvement, improvement and enhancement are much more rewarding than just following the pack. Also the questioning of the what is being done and considered good today, because this might not be the case today as it was in the past when it became broadly accepted.

Gee, I sound like a preacher man. Funny to say that from myself, considering that I am not religious myself at all.

If the merchant does not consider this expense theft, then it changes the game significantely. I am saying this, because there are merchants who accept knowingly this extra expense is exchange for traffic and sales at all cost. That can be a profitable excercise for everybody involved (except the clean affiliates of that merchant), if product margins are high enough to still make profits after all those expenses.

That is the reason why I still call it grey, because I have to assume that Hydra did what they did in consensus with the advertiser. It still looks black from an affiliate point of view, but it does not require adware to make it look black for an affiliate. I have always a bad feeling in my stomach, if I think about all the business that I bring to my partners that is not tracked and where I do not get a penny in commissions for. Some industries are more affected by this than others though. I see it mostly for the stuff that I do outside of paid search, but that is a different topic all by itself.

Now my point is that I believe that hunting down and researching all those cases is energy that could be much better spent on a different approach at the whole thing, the promotion of good players and the specification and discussion of the specification of what best practices actually are, the work on industry standards and communication channels, the establishment of an arbitration mechanism where conflicts between the different parties in this industry can be resolved as an option before legal actions are taken, which are costly and more time intensive.

This will help everybody. You can spend today all your time and energy on cases like the Hydra Network/Vista Print one and what are you going to do after that? The next case of unethical behavior by somebody else, after that the next one and so on and so forth. This will never end, because new bad players will enter the market and the industry continues to stay as it is today. The only thing you accomplish is the creation of a “trophy” list with bad players you exposed and maybe even put out of business. This is a waste of time in my opinion and the only thing gained by it, is an ego boost and a moment where you feel better, because justice was served, only to fall back into all this crap to start all over from where you left off before.

Does this make sense?

It is your choice to see it as a grey area. I assert that knowingly allowing network affiliates to steal from their merchant clients isn’t grey at all. And Ben’s reported details and analysis of them are not grey by any stretch of the imagination.

Further, what we’ve been also discussing is our industry’s leaders being unwilling to condemn theivery – you’ve confirmed for me, by calling what Ben has reported here specific to Hydra as a grey area, that you are among those leaders in our industry that are unwilling to flex your judgment muscles.

And yet again, I want to clearly say I’m not picking on your Carsten – you’re willing to discuss these issues publicly, and yet there are many other leaders in our industry reading these comments and are also unwilling to pass any amount of judgment or criticism on Hydra. Collectively, we lack a ethical backbone, so as an entity, our defenses against internal cheating aren’t aggressive white blood cells but are a lumpy gelatinous rudderless ooze… and Hydra’s boots can continue sloshing right along through it with relative ease.

They operate in a grey area that was not created by them. They do that for business reasons and probably don’t feel bad about it. I worked in a big corporate environment long enough to know that ethics are rarely high up on the priority list.

Ethics usually only move up on that list, if there are clear and measurable business benefits that come along with it. If that is not the case, ethics only have a chance, if they come as an added bonus or minimal expense (in time and money).

Highlighting and promoting ethical players would be such a business benefit. A badge or seal to show this must be strong and branded to make it desirable to get one. As I said, I am for a PRO approach and not an ANTI.

I’m not inciting a smear campaign here, but was asking for you to take a stance for yourself. My “Can you join me in saying Hydra is a bad actor in our industry?” was referring to my personal stance on Hydra (which is grossly negative), nothing more.

One last question for you… why is it that you refuse to label Hydra as a bad actor? I am not beginning a witch hunt here, it’s a serious question and it’s face value is all there is to it. Do you, for example, believe they can’t police their affiliates? Or that it’s such a small issue that it doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the effort? Do you believe they do so much good for the industry that the negative aspects aren’t worth the bad actor label (like calling a newspaper bad cuz they use up trees)?

I am truly curious why so many in our industry are unable or unwilling to call a spade a spade.

And again, I assert that our collective unwillingness to call bad actors what they are, is what is slowly but surely undermining our industry. Professionally, our indifference makes us marginally culpable. Our inaction has grown on us like a fungus, and I think as a result, it’s here to stay. Honest ethical folks like you had their ethical judgment ability, and willingness to wield it, rendered impotent through years of neglect, and atrophy has set in.

The idion “reap what you sow” means to experience the results of your own actions… but it’s our inaction that’s obvious here… so we’re more like the lakeside residents who don’t bother to notice our neighbors toxic runoff… or we’ve decided to just admire the lovely green glow it gives off.

And in my analogy here of a lake and it’s monstrous inhabitants, the multiple layers of irony of a network called Hydra is both comical and striking.

Have a great day Carsten, and enjoy the view of the lake… for now.

I dedicated a whole post at SEJ to this subject in an attempt to better illustrate my views.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anti-versus-pro-two-very-different-approaches-to-solve-a-conflict-or-issue/7835/

I am a strong believer that the PRO approach will work better than the ANTI one. The ANTI approach has the tendency to turn into a radical witch-hunt, denunciations, black-mail, hatred and the seizure of any constructive discussion.

I will not join a denunciation campaign against Hydra, because I think that it would be a waste of time and energy and not have any positive long term effects.

On a personal note. I am looking at any CPA network with suspicion and do not trust any of them any further as I am able to spit. This includes prominent CPA networks like AzoogleAds, Neverblue, XY7 and the countless others out there.

I even extend this suspicion to the traditional affiliate networks like CJ and LinkShare and there are only a few that I trust. Trust is lost quickly and earned only slowly with a lot of efforts needed. The loss of trust was caused by the networks themselves.

I do most stuff today outside the large networks, most of the time via direct relationships with merchants, using their in-house tracking platform (custom or out-of-box solutions like Kowabunga). I used to be performance partner with BeFree once to see that networks can do better, if they want to. If they would treat all of their publishers like their special performance partners, things would be better, including for the networks themselves. Many of the “privileges” don’t cost the networks anything to justify the limitation to only a few selected publishers.

Back to the issue and the PRO and ANTI approach. I believe that it will be more efficient and long term successful, if we recognize and highlight the good players and reward businesses who self-restrict themselves by adopting clearly spelled out best practices. The reward would be official recognition like a seal of approval or something of that sort. This would have to be advertised not just within this industry, but to the outside as well, that industry outsiders are able to easily recognize good players in the industry who are recognized by their peers and also able to find out quickly what being a good player means.

This implies what not being a good player means to the industry itself. Those “not good” players distance themselves from the rest of the industry and if legislation decides to target those, it will be fine with me.

Does this make sense?

Watering down what is happening with delusions that some merchants want this behavior, or clouding the discussion with PRO/ANTI war stance talk, or excusing this away as a cost of doing business, or swallowing that it’s a small problem while evidence smacks us otherwise, are exactly the reasons why nothing has ever been done to stop this behavior.

Carsten, clarity is needed. Hydra needs to be denounced for allowing this activity to happen. If anything short of that occurs, the quagmire of confusion will continue.

People like you need to clearly say that Hydra has a fiduciary responsibility to their clients that they are willfully, negligently disregarding.

Can you join me in saying Hydra is a bad actor in our industry? Or would you like to postulate more war stance theories to obfuscate what Hydra, and others like them, are doing?

And I feel compelled again to say that I’m not directing this argument at you with specificity – in fact, your willingness to discuss it intellectually raises you far above the din. You need to exercise a little greater clarity, and others who lead in our industry need to be much more like you (and the you I urge you to become).

We are seeing the signs of our collective neglect slowly growing. A problem exists, it needs to be acknowledged and attributed before we can reasonably discuss potential solutions. Sadly, most are unwilling to admit the problem and view and share it with any modicum of clarity.