- Helping readers/users find wine for purchase is very important. WineLog has affiliate links first to help users buy wine they are interested in and second to make money for us.

- Still if people realize that you’re making money off clicks and referrals, they may be a little put off. Especially because the amount of money we’re talking about can be pretty small, it might be a better idea to nix the affiliate part of the link and just link to the best place to find the wine.

- However, as stated, these intermediate affiliate programs are really good at helping you find the lowest price, etc. And I don’t feel like spending my time finding which site is selling x wine for the cheapest. I’d rather just link to WineZap, Wine Searcher, or the site Triggit (very cool) tells me to.

- In my experience so far, I am getting much less than 7.5 or 6 or even 3 cents per click through affiliates that give you a percentage of sales vs. a set price. I’m told that outfits like Triggit are working to increase the % that goes to the publishers, which should help here. At the size we are now, it is more important to go with the affiliate program that gives us the most reliable links and cheapest prices for our users. For good business reasons this will probably always be the case.

- And a slightly related aside: Believe me, I’ve thought of hundreds of ways to increase click throughs and generally generate more affiliate $ and ad $ on WineLog, but at this point it’s not worth the damage it would do to our image to pimp things too hard. Now maybe when these changes are generating an extra $5k per month for us, rather than just an extra couple hundred bucks, I’ll consider losing my integrity… but I doubt it.

Cheers.

The more conditioned people get to buying wine direct, the healthier and more diverse the industry will become - especially for small producers. Blogs like yours should lead the way.

Wine searcher pays me to do this. The retailers don’t. My reader is free to choose whatever retailer they want to purchase the wine from. There is zero conflict of interest.

But I’ll go one further. Even if I sent people to a SPECIFIC retailer, and got a cut of the sale, I don’t believe that to be a significant conflict of interest. The effort required to create a reasonable wine review (which, incidentally, readers are able to judge) far outweighs the returns from such an affiliate scheme, at least far enough that it would make the effort of simply writing reviews of only/all the wines that a particular retailed sold a non-starter (unless you were particularly masochistic).

At the end of the day, you’re doing the reader more of a favor than you are the retailer, and you don’t affect whether or not that person chooses to buy the wine or not, so it’s pretty hard to argue for a conflict of interest. I see it as a totally different animal than, say, selling advertisements on your site for a particular winery or producer and then writing a review of the wine.

Finally, someone has contacted me and is setting up an affiliate system very much like the one you describe, Josh, where wine bloggers will get a percentage cut when someone buys wine.

Alder

Glad you guys had a good time and enjoyed the wine. We ate at the Farmhouse not long ago and I had some of the best duck ever to grace a plate - and the portions were huge. Great place. Thanks for the comment and for the kind words about the boy. I know Candace can’t wait to have the little guy out of her ASAP.

Andrew,

Your comment reminds me of a great exchange from Meet The Parents:

“Can you ever really trust another human being, Greg?”
“Yeah I think so…”
“No. The answer is no.”

I think if you cultivate a reputation as being a straight shooter and are transparent with the fact that you will be making money off of the link and that it will help defray the costs of running the blog, well I don’t see a problem with that at all. People do it all the time with book reviews and countless other items on Amazon etc.

As for wine blogs that use an affiliate system, you do read one: Vinography. And I don’t think anyone questions Alder’s authenticity or independence. But the reason you don’t see any others is because for the most part affiliate systems simply don’t exist! Thus my rant above.

My whole point in suggesting this is to make an end run around the corrupt and evil three tier system and to supplant them with individuals running blogs like yours. I think blogs can be a profitable distribution channel, both for the winery and bloggers, allowing both to maintain their independence.

Great discussion.

I actually can’t think of a single wine blog that uses the affiliation schemes.

I really enjoyed spending the afternoon with you and your lovely wife, friends and parents sipping outstanding pinot. My wife (Anna) and I both thought the SeaSmoke was….AWESOME!
Of course, there were many other great pinots which we enjoyed. We buy Moshin at Uncorked in Saratoga so we were a bit biased. I thought the $115 was nice, and the D’agostini was great as well.

We stayed at the Farmhouse and spent big money on wines that were not nearly as tasty as the ones you shared with us!
Good luck with your first child. You have been blessed! We hope to see you again soon!

Regards,

Marty

Thanks for the comment. I do read Spitoon! But sites like yours and Vinography are few and far between.

As far as conflicts of interest go, I don’t think that supplying a link to purchase a wine that you have already deemed to be worthy of a good review and receiving a cut of the sale necessarily creates a conflict of interest. And if such a concern does exist, linking to places to buy the wines without taking a cut is really no different from Parker providing producer phone numbers for the wines he reviews.