Beuningen, June 27, 2024: Influencers, bloggers and content creators are under pressure to be transparent about their collaborations and revenue models. “Certified by Influencerrules.com“, an initiative of the DDMA en Advertising Code Foundation, seem to be a step in the right direction, but appearances can be deceiving. Despite the promise of greater openness, content creators are faced with a cumbersome system and hidden costs. In this article we take a critical look at certification practices and the consequences for those involved.
Deceptive Practices at “Certified by Influencer Rules.com” and the Advertising Code Foundation: A Critical Look
Influencers feel misled by “Certified by Influencer Rules.com”, the DDMA and the Advertising Code Foundation. It seemed like a good initiative for more transparency, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.
Influencers, bloggers and content creators must obtain a certificate to be transparent about their collaborations and revenue model. That in itself is positive, clarity is always welcome.
Problematic in practice
However, its implementation is problematic. It is unprofessional and especially cumbersome to manually add additional tags, hashtags, information banners and comments to every piece of content what is generated during or after a collaboration. Besides being cumbersome and taking a lot of extra time, it may have a significant impact on you SEO. Further explanation follows below.
1. A lot of extra work without yielding anything
Every story, post, blog and affiliate link must be marked correctly according to the rules. This is extremely time-consuming, especially for bloggers who also manage various social media channels, and above all, it looks sloppy.
Blog articles and social media stories in particular fare poorly. While YouTubers produce an average of one video per week in which the advertisement must be reported once, blogging content creators post many dozens or even hundreds of messages, blog posts and stories per week.
All these stories, messages, blog posts and links must then be added manually, one by one, in the right format, in the right place, in the right color, etc. etc. Due to the limitations of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, this is difficult or impossible to automate.
It therefore creates a lot of extra (unpaid) work. It would be better to state this somewhere clearly and generally, rather than in every post or story.
2. It looks unprofessional
Regarding affiliate links in blog articles: according to the guidelines of influencersrules.com you must put a mention before or after each link, which is simply unworkable.
An example:
This is a packing list for a travel blog article Namibia. According to the guidelines, there should be a mention immediately before or immediately after the affiliate link, per affiliate link.
According to the guidelines, seen in black and white, it should look like this, so that it is clear to everyone that it concerns sponsored and/or affiliate links.
It looks sloppy and unprofessional. In addition, there is the possible impact on SEO. Repeatedly repeating words is absolutely not recommended for blog articles, especially when it comes to words such as 'sponsored', 'affiliate' and 'advertisement'. Ranking in Google will become virtually impossible with these words repeatedly in your text.
3. Negative impact on SEO resulting in lower rankings
Another bad point that blogging content creators encounter is that the first paragraph is sacrosanct for Google and SEO optimizations in general. The guidelines of influencerrules.com are clear: they expect you to use this part of your article to state that it is sponsored content, a collaboration or advertisement.
This is unworkable. Google has been very clear over the years about the content of the first paragraphs of your blog article, and what it should contain. If your first paragraphs are not directly and exclusively about your content, many people will click away.
Google knows this, which is why you will immediately earn negative points for your rankings if you talk about advertisements or sponsored content there. Below you can see how Yoast SEO, the largest and most well-known WordPress SEO plugin, has neatly expressed and summarized Google's requirements.
The revenue model is not transparent
What also bothers influencers (from polls done in the largest travel bloggers community of the Netherlands and Belgium), is that “Certified by Influencer Rules.com” itself is not transparent about their revenue model.
The certificate can be obtained for free until the end of August, after which it costs 50 euros. This is not clearly stated on the front page, information page or course page. It's hidden in the small print of the FAQ under various questions.
You must make the connections between the various FAQ questions, the information page and the payment page yourself to find out that you will pay 50 euros per year for this certificate. Without any guarantee that this will remain 50 euros per year.
This is a major problem for a large group of travel bloggers who are active with their blogs and social media channels and enter into collaborations with them, but make little or no profit.
Remark: From previous polls in the Dutch Travel Bloggers Community it has been shown that approximately 50% of active travel bloggers in the Netherlands and Belgium earn little or no money from it.
It is not explicitly stated on the information page and when paying for the certificate that it will cost money every year. According to the fine print in the FAQ, the certificate obtained (as yet free) is only valid for one year. After this, an extension is required. You will then automatically receive a message about this.
When you then read that you will pay 31 euros as of August 50 to obtain the certificate and will then have to renew it annually, it can only be concluded that the certificate will cost at least 50 euros per year.
Looking at the number of influencers who have already obtained the certificate within the first two months after launching the website (this is currently approximately 1250), this amounts to a calculation of 1250×50 euros per year = 62.500 euros per year in income for influencerrules.com. This amount may increase considerably. After all, the website has only recently gone live and many influencers have yet to obtain the certificate.
If transparency is important to us, Influencerrules.com, the DDMA and the advertising committee should start doing this themselves. Content creators are misled into a revenue model that is hidden in the small print.
Chris Thomassen – Wereldreizigers.nl
Transparency is essential
Transparency is essential in the world of influencers and content creators, we can all probably agree on that. However, this must apply to all parties and must also be workable in practice. Manually listing tens of thousands of tags every year is unworkable in my opinion. In addition, it would be beneficial for “Certified by Influencer Rules.com”, DDMA and the Advertising Code Foundation to start being open about their revenue model and the conditions of their certificate. Only then can we truly speak of honesty and clarity in the sector. Until then, content creators remain trapped in a system that misleads them and imposes additional work and costs.
