Credit crisis causes extra work for affiliates

[Czar]

With financial service providers changing interest rates and credit terms on a fairly constant basis these days, those affiliates who use micro-sites, detailed landing pages or descriptive text links to promote financial offers have found themselves being forced to alter creatives as often as once a week in order to keep their copy fresh.

Some networks have even taken to changing their standard terms and conditions as they apply to offers of this type, such as the DGM Australia Network, which today issued these new terms:

“Where dgm provides notice of a required update to interest rates, fees, dates etc (ie anything factual) published on an affiliate site in relation to the promotion of a given finance campaign run through the dgm Australia Network, the requested changes must be carried out as soon as reasonably practical but in any event no later than 48 hours after receiving the request from dgm.

If the requested updates are not completed within the 48 hour period, dgm will not pay commission for any activity generated for the given campaign from the end of the 48 hour period until the correct information is updated.

If on two separate occasions an affiliate fails to make a requested change within the 48 hour period, dgm may remove the offending Affiliate from the promotion of the given campaign(s) with immediate effect.”

How many of our fellow Geeks have been affected by this? I know I have.

Are you having to update your affiliate links constantly as a flow-on effect from the US sub-prime crisis?

[Jack]

I actually shut down two credit card sites in 2005 due to the need to constantly update rates. They had stopped performing well and the time to update wasn't worth it to me. I imagine now with financial companies more web savvy and protective of their online branding, there is a much bigger push to keep these rates on affiliate sites up to date than when I promoted them. Still, relaunching my credit card sites is on my to do list with a better system of keeping this information up to date.

[wsz]

My solution is simple. I just don't include the ongoing interest rates.

Although I will specify things like "0% for six months on balance transfers." Or if a card had, "Prime plus such-and-such percent."

I guess that including the rates might help with CTR and conversions. But I'm not sure if it would be enough to justify the extra time and hassle.