Most affiliates don’t read affiliate agreements. I realize this from many years of managing affiliate programs and gathering data for AffStat reports, but it’s still frustrating.
Not only does this laziness lead to problems like unauthorized trademark bidding and misuse of coupon codes, which make it less attractive for companies to work with some affiliates, but it can lead to lost earnings for affiliates.
For instance, in the Affiliate Summit affiliate program, it is clearly stated that “Affiliate Summit will not pay out commission on sales resulting from affiliates using domains that include affiliatesummit, affiliate-summit, or any other derivative.”
But that doesn’t stop people from frequently buying those sorts of domains, almost always with a private registration, and then driving traffic to the affiliate program with them. I just saw that affiliatesummitlv.com was registered this week.
When the affiliates doing this, or any other forbidden practice, are caught, they don’t get paid.
Some go to forums, Twitter, etc. to shout about how an advertiser or network ripped them off.
Take note affiliates – it’s not OK to break the rules just because you didn’t bother to read them. And you’re not being ripped off when you don’t get paid for doing things that are prohibited.