Below is the transcript of my conversation with Brook Schaaf, CEO of FMTC, at CJU24 in Santa Barbara, California.
You may recognise Schaaf from this very site – he’s written on affiliate’s underrepresentation in the wider ad mix, as well as decoding FTC regulations – or his fantastic newsletter, or LinkedIn articles.
He’s a well-known, intelligent thinker in the space, particularly when it comes to couponing, so I was looking forward to catching up about all the dramatic happenings in that field this year.
Of course, we covered Site Reputation Abuse, but most interestingly, Schaaf provided a perspective on publishers trying to reclaim their flatlining traffic – something that has impacted a large number of affiliates recently.
We also spoke about Reddit and Schaaf delivered an answer to a lingering question leftover from my previous series on the platform: how do you scale an affiliate programme on Reddit using unique coupon codes?
As expected, this was a very valuable chat and I’m pleased to share the insights here.
Sol Wilkinson: Brook, how are you finding the event so far?
Brook Schaaf: So far, so good. CJU is a really great show. They get some great presentations, very good networking. And it's nice to be here in paradise, in Santa Barbara, California.
SW: It certainly is. Brook, I'm a big fan of your newsletter. You’re a prominent spokesperson for the affiliate industry. Particularly in the coupon space. The area has seen a lot of shaking up this year and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on a lot of this.
First of all, there was the Site Reputation Abuse update. Google took down several notable coupon players. For example, Daily Mail coupons, and other newspaper directories, are now completely gone from search results. There have been winners, Vouchercodes.co.uk has performed very well in the aftermath of this. How has it affected sites in the US?
BS: Very similar. So, this is what they called vouchergeddon, which hit on May 5th of this year, if I recall correctly. We followed it closely.
To clarify, these sites are not serviced by FMTC, and the companies that power them are not competitors of FMTC.
You could say that these sites, like coupons.CNN in the US, were competitors of FMTC subscribers, because we power largely enterprise couponing reward sites with other data for commerce content guys.
I was quite surprised by the action. This vouchergeddon took place many years after these sites were well established. The content was good. They tended to work with relatively small merchant sets, usually in the low hundreds. From what I was able to see, they provided good-quality content. They often distributed business development deals, and made a lot of money for these sites.
The reputation abuse concept was that they took advantage of the site authority they had from largely being news sites and they applied it to coupons. Google finally said, “No more of this, guys,” and basically whacked them all. And millions, probably tens of millions of dollars in commissions were lost, or perhaps re-diverted.
