In House Affilate Programs

[shawn81]

Ok so during my day job I work in Ecommerce Marketing for a large nationwide retailer and I also tinker with some affiliate marketing on the side. We run our affiliate program through Linkshare and I'm starting to wonder about them.

They were wondering if we wanted to join their "In House" affiliate program called MallNetworks(dot)com. After thinking about this a bit more, isn't that a huge conflict of interest for their affiliates? Don't they have access to all the data, keywords, traffic sources etc that drive sales for thousands of their customers? Seems kind of underhanded to me.

What do you guys think about that? Also makes me wonder what other networks out there have similar "in house" affiliates?

Thoughts?

 

[bb_wolfe]

Ok so during my day job I work in Ecommerce Marketing for a large nationwide retailer and I also tinker with some affiliate marketing on the side. We run our affiliate program through Linkshare and I'm starting to wonder about them.

They were wondering if we wanted to join their "In House" affiliate program called MallNetworks(dot)com. After thinking about this a bit more, isn't that a huge conflict of interest for their affiliates? Don't they have access to all the data, keywords, traffic sources etc that drive sales for thousands of their customers? Seems kind of underhanded to me.

What do you guys think about that? Also makes me wonder what other networks out there have similar "in house" affiliates?

Thoughts?

Might be a good job promotion for you, director of the affiliate program, etc. Would certainly be good experience setting the whole shebang up!

 

[shawn81]

Ok just to be clear, I DO run the affiliate program for our company. My post was referring to Linkshares shady tactics by running an "in house" program and competing with all their affiliates.