Affiliates Need to Pay Attention: Your Affiliate Network can get you in Trouble

Affiliates Need to Pay Attention: Your Affiliate Network can get you in Trouble

Affiliates need to pay attention; your affiliate network's actions could get you in some serious trouble. If you think that as an affiliate you can just put any advertisement up, regardless of what it's advertising, regardless of the claims, you are seriously wrong. Affiliate Networks already have a history of throwing their affiliates under the bus when it comes to lawsuits and blaming "rogue affiliates." If you are making money from affiliate marketing, you need to examine whether your network is going to cause you financial harm or send you to jail.

I have written about this before: the legal standard is generally that publications are not liable for the bad behavior of their advertisers. The courts have been pretty clear about this and have ruled time and time again that the very act of publishing an advertisement does not make the publisher, for example a newspaper or website, a partner in the advertisements. The only service that the publisher is providing is the actual "space" for the advertisement to be shown.

However, for a publisher to assert this independence, the publisher must be completely separate from the advertiser regarding the claims and content of the advertising. The publisher must be only selling "space" for the advertiser, not involved with any other decisions whatsoever. Bennet G. Kelley of the Internet Law Center explained to in a brief conversation about this topic, once a publisher gets more involved "there is a potential for greater liability. The greater role one takes the greater risk they take."

In here comes the problem for many affiliates: since they are not supplying just space but work as "partners" with the affiliate networks and the advertiser, they could be held liable for the content of those advertisements. Depending on their involvement with the advertiser, this means that there is a very real possibility that if the advertiser and the network were named in a civil or criminal action, the affiliate could also be part of that action.

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