Last week Jennifer Fong notified her readers about a new policy at WordPress.com which bans MLMs blogs on their service. While the main purpose of her post, Important Information for WordPress.com Users, is to inform bloggers about the new policy and to offer tips on continuing to blog there and stay within their policies, she also asked, “What do you think about these rules? Do you think the actions of a few “bad apples” is messing it up for the rest of us? Is it fair?” This is my response to those questions.
As someone who offers free and paid advertising and marketing services for direct sellers, I have a lot of sympathy for WordPress.com’s position. Of course I don’t think all MLMs are pyramid schemes. There are many legitimate, worthwhile MLMs, but I also think there are more than a few bad apples in the industry. Personally, I don’t want to do anything to help any scams and schemes promote themselves, so I do what I can to avoid accepting advertisements from them on my sites. But how do I draw the line?
The frustration over trying to decide whether the relatively few questionable requests I get each week are legitimate MLMs or a schemes or scams led me to also set new rules. I now don’t accept listings for companies more commonly referred to as MLMs, and accept only what I call “party plan” companies. Yet at times I still struggle over classifying some companies that are more like hybrids than like one or the other.
At WordPress.com, more than 450,000 new blogs were created just last month. If they don’t just ban MLMs outright, how much time can they be expected to devote to making determinations of who should stay and who should go? Or should they not have rules at all?
Perhaps it is unfair to ban all MLMs, but I think it’s also unfair to call it discrimination as some did in Tweets. In a sense, they are simply setting an advertising policy the same way any other publication does. If everyone had played by the rules in the first place, and not created WordPress.com blogs “to direct readers to external domains for commercial purposes,” new rules wouldn’t be necessary. But like everything else, there are too many people willing to exploit, and they make it harder for the rest of us. More restrictive policies become necessary.
And by the way…. while they are lumped together in one category I don’t think WordPress.com called all MLMs pyramid schemes. The sentence reads, “This includes multi-level marketing (MLM) blogs and pyramid schemes.” (Emphasis on the “and” added by me.) However, I would say that some more clarity there is probably a good idea.
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November 30th, 2009 at 11:10 AM
Linda,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! I guess my biggest issue is that they DO allow other businesses “to direct readers to external domains for commercial purposes,” just not MLMs. That in my mind is discriminatory.
Now I completely understand that there are some folks out there who are doing questionable things. But when consultants are part of Direct Selling Association member companies, those companies have agreed to abide by a set of ethics. So when a company like WordPress automatically takes ethical companies and bars them because of unethical companies’ practices, I think it’s discriminatory.
And MLMs were lumped in the category of “Affiliate Marketing.” This is untrue. MLM is not affiliate marketing. That is something else entirely. Yet it shows that WordPress made a sweeping generalization that was not based on research or an understanding of the direct sales industry. And that I have a problem with.
So I guess we have to agree to disagree a bit on these points. My biggest concern, however, is that this is an indication of things to come. If big companies like WordPress close to direct sellers, what will happen when direct selling companies wake up and finally start training the field on the proper ways to use the social web? Will we find all the doors are already closed to us? That is my biggest issue.
Thanks again for participating in the discussion!
Jennifer
November 30th, 2009 at 11:52 AM
Hi Jennifer. Thanks for coming by and commenting. It’s respectful disagreement of course. You and I are usually on the same wavelength!
Are they allowing commercial blogs by “rules” or by not getting around to deleting them? No matter what the policy, enforcing it when hundreds of thousands of blogs are added monthly is a huge nightmare at best. My understanding has been that commercial purpose blogs have never been allowed.
I considered instituting a policy of only accepting advertising for companies that are DSA members because of their set of ethics. But then there are many legitimate companies that aren’t members. What are your thoughts on that?
And yes, a better understanding of the direct selling industry would be a great thing in many instances! I think a big part of the problem is that there are differences between the “dictionary definitions” of direct sales, MLM, and network marketing, and how many (most?) people use those terms.
It can become a slippery slope. Again, it’s just hard to know where to draw the line.