Ethic in Making Money: Where Do You Draw The Line?
Posted by Cap in Even More Ramblings |As I was reading the Click Fraud story from Business Week, I got rather pissed off when I read the nonchalant responses from the people that participated in click fraud scheme. It’s as if they have no issue with stealing money from other people.
Click fraud basically involves clicking on pay-per-click links with the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. The “pay to read” operations mentioned in the article involved a group of users from a 2,200 member network, in which the users receive daily email from the site runner so they know where to go to click on ads.
The network owner, according to the article, doesn’t think she’s doing anything improper and illegal — even though she knows advertisers would be mad if people are just clicking on ads without actually being interested in the products.
In a related scenario, a friend of mine use to work at at a loan company. He would make calls to prospective customers and convince them to refinance with their company, with the full knowledge that the refinance option he offered will put the borrower into a worse situation. It bothered him in the beginning, but he kept working there regardless — he needed the money after all.
What about the TMX Elmo mentioned in the post below? Is it okay for people to buy an Elmo with the intention to resale at a higher price? Is that cheating someone indirectly or just taking advantage of market demand? I suppose this is less of an issue than the pay-to-read networks mentioned in the article above.
Let’s take a look at this blog of mine too. I have some sponsor link that have questionable products. Payday loans would be one of them. In my opinion payday loans are utter crap, though I do understand that the service may be a convenience (an expensive one) for some particular people in some specific job field. Still, most people will do well to stay clear of payday loans because of the insane finance charges.
Yet even with that view, I have the text link on my blog. Though I don’t expect anyone to actually click on the link, go to the web site and apply for a cash advance; having the link on my blog may improve the site’s page rank, thereby increasing the chance of someone finding the site from a search engine and using the payday loan service.
I’ve rejected plenty of text link placement request which are out-right frauds or scams, so I suppose that’s where I drew my line. You also won’t see me praising a crappy product just because I was offered tons of money. But now that I think about it, it’s pretty silly to have that standard and then be totally okay about a text link ad just for a couple of bucks.
Looks like I should re-examine the line I’ve drawn for myself before I go and get pissed about pay-to-read networks.
9 Comments to “Ethic in Making Money: Where Do You Draw The Line?”
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September 25th, 2006 at 6:07 am
I recently started a business which involves paying people to fill things out online – and you have to be VERY diligent about letting EVERYONE know that you are paying people to do this, because advertisers get really pissed if they think they are getting only interested clickers, and not people who are filling out this form because they are getting paid. Paid to click stuff is very dicey and I am staying well away from it, because of stuff like this. The rates they pay for regular people is much higher than the rate they pay for people who are looking to make money – and usually fewer “regular” people click on an ad because they will only click on it if they are interested. So not only are they getting less quality traffic, they are paying through the NOSE for it.
September 25th, 2006 at 6:32 am
I know what you mean Kira, having full disclosure about a program will definitely make things less in the grey area. If an advertiser knows and understand what they’re getting, they shouldn’t have any beef with it.
There’s lots of pay-to-do so & so programs out there, plenty of them seem to be fine to me. I participate in some paid online surveys sites and I’m fine with it, enough to recommend them because they may be worthwhile to some people.
But pay-to-read programs went from “oh check out these interesting websites, and click on the ads if they interest you..” to “here’s a list of website with links of ads, click on them!”
The part that gets me really sad is the lady that operates that PTR network. She spends all that time on the network and only takes home (supposedly ) around $60 a month. If she’s savvy enough to operate a network like that, she should be able to make as much with other type of programs without having to worry about any wrongdoing.
But yeah then again she doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong.
September 25th, 2006 at 8:32 am
And of course people like that are going to bring down the rest of us, including those of us who were up front about paying our users in the first place. Paid to click rates are going way down just like advertising rates did for banner ads on big sites – you no longer get quality clicks and it doesn’t produce a good ROI for the company.
September 25th, 2006 at 10:25 am
There’s differences between the things you brought up. The click fraud is a scam because the advertisers wouldn’t be willing to pay out that money if they knew what the click fraud people are doing.
For the payday loans and the mortgages your friend was selling, people really should pay attention to what they’re buying and make sure they’re not getting into something that’s a bad deal for them. But as long as no one’s lying, it’s not a scam. Is it ok to sell people these things, knowing you hope they’ll make a mistake? It’s kind of a gray area. I’d put it in the same category as car dealerships, state lotteries, and vacation time shares.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with buying a TMX Elmo to sell on ebay, any more than there’s anything wrong with buying a barrel of oil and selling it later for a higher price. If people are willing to pay $100 for these things, then their market value is $100, and that’s what they’re worth. Like anything else it’s worth whatever someone will pay. What do you suppose would happen if Walmart started selling 1 ounce bars of gold for $200? Does it make me a bad person if I empty my savings account to take advantage of this?
September 25th, 2006 at 10:39 am
In regards to the TMX Elmo, what I really meant was that.. by buying an Elmo with the sole purpose of resale.. you’re taking one less available product off the retail market, away from one real buyer who wanted to buy it for their child. And you’re right, there’s nothing wrong with buying a highly demanded item for low price if you have the chance to.
What I was thinking in my head though as I wrote that.. is that, lets say you’re at Target and you spotted the last Elmo on the shelf, you grabbed it so you can resale it online, and you did it right before a women can grab it for her son (for the sake of making my point, let’s say this is a fact). What then?
Again, I’m not saying it’s wrong to resale.. it’s just, in that particular situation, I personally wouldn’t be too comfortable to follow through with my initial plan, and I’ll most likely hand over the Elmo to the lady.
September 29th, 2006 at 9:17 am
“and you did it right before a women can grab it for her son”
So what? Think about the woman’s motives for wanting this for her child. I refer to the title of this blog. Anything that has an inflated price beyond it’s intrinsic value based upon emotional decision making, is sure to go down in value within a short period of time, and isn’t needed to survive, is CRAP.
September 29th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Yeah….payday loans really suck. I did some research on it for one of my recent posts posts…they “offer” rates like 1300% or something…haven’t seen a crapier rate than that for quite some time.
September 29th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
With TMX Elmos or Playstations or any other product that people buy and then resell on Ebay, what they’re really selling is a service. The person buying it on Ebay, had they wanted to, could have gone to the trouble of pre-ordering, lining up in a parking lot at 4 AM in the freezing cold, or whatever it takes to buy these hot ticket items in the stores when they come out. Instead, they chose to buy them on Ebay, paying a higher price for more convenience.
To put it another way, think of price as a form of rationing scarce goods. With these high demand items, price no longer works as a form of rationing because companies don’t raise their prices enough. Instead, the form of rationing becomes time: you can only have this item if you will spend your time jumping through hoops to get it (and pay something). Sellers on Ebay are selling their time, a totally legitimate activity.