Forbes Magazine is running a report on how affiliates use photographs of young women to encourage clicks on display ads.
The behavior of that affiliate in the report is a perfect example as The Tragedy of the Commons describes, which is a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen.
Below is a sample quote from the article and I think it is a worth for every affiliate read it:
In this particular case, Mylife’s affiliate advertiser had grabbed an image from a dodgier site called Jailbaitgallery.com, evident from a tiny logo in the lower right hand corner. And Jailbait Gallery, in turn, frequently scrapes the Web for its content – in other words, pulling pictures from sites where people might have posted provocative or alluring pictures of themselves or their friends. Jailbait Gallery’s main stock in trade: It aggregates picture of semi-nude and scantily clad girls and encourages users to vote on how young they think the subjects are. The pictures that wound up as part of the Facebook ad campaign were voted by the Jailbait Gallery crowd to be around 16 years old, continuing read the entire article here …
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