Hi Kate,
Sorry to hear you saw “red flags” with our service. That is definitely NOT our intention with this plugin, or our service at all. Please allow me to touch on each of your points:
I had to agree to a roughly 7,000-word contract before I could get the plugin running for affiliate linking. What exactly is one agreeing to, in plain English?
This is our Terms of Service. Just like any service that you use (including things like iTunes Affiliate program terms of use, which is 21 pages and the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement, which is 13.), you agree to the service’s terms. Most services just make you check a box that states “I agree” when you sign up, but our goal is to not be shady and tell you exactly what it is you’re signing up for. We want full transparency with our service, which is why, when creating a Geniuslink account, we show you the full Terms of Service instead of just giving you a check box. You can also find both our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service on our website – both completely publicly accessible.
On the plugin page, GeniusLink hides the fact that the plugin isn’t free. It even goes so far as to say “it’s completely free,” but read a bit more, and you’ll find that the completely free version doesn’t even allow you to add your affiliate ID to your links
The plugin is free and will automatically find all iTunes links and globalize them for you, giving your international users a better experience. The goal of the plugin is to ensure that none of your international users end up at an error page, or are unable to buy the item you’re promoting in the iTunes store.
However, if you want to take that a step further and also earn affiliate commissions, see reports, and take advantage of all of the other cool things we can do for the iTunes ecosystem, you can sign up for Geniuslink, which syncs with the iTunes Link Engine plugin but is not the same thing.
Geniuslink is not free (nor do we claim it is – full details for our pricing are on our website). They are two separate tools that work together from the same company, but are not the same product.
Do I have to pay for Geniuslink? If you would like access to advanced reporting features and be able to affiliate all of your links, you will need to sign up for a Geniuslink account. Try it out for free for 30 days. By default, Geniuslink’s affiliate token will be used until you have added your own via the Geniuslink dashboard.
This is in the FAQ of the iTunes Link Engine, which is not intentionally buried and publicly accessible (as is our Terms of Service). I apologize that you felt that way, do you have any suggestions on how we could make that clearer?
Unless you sign up for their service, agree to some crazy terms, and hand over your credit card details, they’ll nab your revenue. Sounds like a great deal for them.
Again – the “terms” is a standard Terms of Service. Nothing crazy there. Every service has one. And yes, for Geniuslink we ask that you give us a credit card to pay for the clicks we serve for you and your clients. One thing I think there may be some confusion about is that we do not “nab” your revenue when you sign up for Geniuslink. IF you only use the iLE plugin WITHOUT signing up for a Geniuslink account, you are correct that we use our affiliate IDs by default. This is to help pay for the resources, servers, staff, and Sunday afternoon support (even on the rare sunny Seattle day) to keep our products alive. HOWEVER, if you sign up for Geniuslink and tell us which affiliate IDs to use, you will always earn 100% of your commissions unless you refuse to pay your Geniuslink bill.
So – since you have 30 days to try Geniuslink completely free, and we don’t bill you until after the month is over, you have two full months before you even see a bill from us for Geniuslink (not for iLE). Then, you have another 30 days after that to pay that bill, meaning you might not get charged for using our service for a full 3 months, all the while your affiliate tokens are being used and you are earning that affiliate revenue while taking advantage of our service.
Only if you generate over 1,000 clicks in a month’s time and refuse to pay that first bill, after you’ve had 30 days after receiving that bill to do so, will we lock your account, send you an email saying “your account is locked until you pay” and then will start using our affiliate IDs on your links. There is no money grab here. We are simply trying to pay for the resources required to run the service to help you make more money from your international audience. That’s it.
“GeoRiot employs a pay-per-click model; you will be charged on a monthly basis for the number of clicks on your links during the previous month that are deemed by GeoRiot to have originated organically (non-bot clicks).”
This is correct. Instead of making you pay a monthly service fee for something that you might not ever get any use out of, instead we employ a model where you only pay for what you use. Again, the pricing details are available on our website (see link above).
“The first 30 days of the Service is free for new clients. Each account gets a certain number of clicks for free each month before being charged. The number of free clicks before your credit card will be charged is published on the Website pricing page (https://www.georiot.com/pricing/). The number of free clicks is subject to change.”
Yep. You get 30 days with unlimited clicks to try out the Geniuslink service completely free of charge. After that first 30 days, you STILL get 1,000 clicks for free each month, regardless of how long you’ve used the service. So if you never go over 1,000 clicks in a month, you never pay for Geniuslink. The piece about the number of free clicks being subject to change is pretty similar to every other term you’ll find in any other Terms of Service for any other service that you use. It just means we can adjust the number of free clicks if needed – including raising the number of free clicks we offer per month.
“If your account is past due for more than 90 days, GeoRiot may reassign your Short URL. It may also reassign your URL with your consent or if it has failed to yield at least 10 organic clicks (i.e., non-bot-generated clicks) per month for six consecutive months.”
This is referring to our geni.us links (ex. https://geni.us/mylink) which is our short URL service and is not related to the iLE WordPress plugin. What this means is that if you create a short link (like https://geni.us/mylink) and don’t use it at all, but another client who is actually using the service wants that custom URL, we will attempt to contact you to see if you’re using it. If you’re not, we will then remove your previous link and allow someone else to grab that custom URL. This is not meant to be malicious at all. Again, we want to spell out every little possible scenario in our Terms of Service so that our clients are aware of what they’re getting into.
“Upon termination for any reason the Service will immediately stop serving your affiliate tracking code but we may continue to redirect clicks with GeoRiot’s tracking code. In such cases, GeoRiot will receive any affiliate program revenue associated with your links until you delete or modify the links.”
Correct. If you cancel your account or if you are delinquent on your payments for your Geniuslink account, we will still serve those links for you because we never want to give your users a dead link. So instead of just no longer serving the link and making your users suffer, we continue to let them get to the destination they’re trying to go (like the iTunes product) and to cover the cost of doing so, we use our affiliate token. This is again just letting you know that in that very specific use case, (you close your account but are still sending clicks, or you refuse to pay us), we will instead earn that affiliate revenue and continue to serve your users.
There are just too many red flags. At the very least, the developers seem to be purposely vague by not making it clear in the plugin’s description and landing page that this is not a free service.
Sorry that it feels vague. We’ve tried to put the affiliate and payment information in as many places as possible, but we can’t force everyone to read everything. Again, if you have any suggestions on how we can make the wording stronger or better, we are all ears.
I’m not against paying for services in the least, but I am against shadiness, and there’s not much shadier in the world of affiliate linking than inserting your own ID in place of someone else’s.
If we didn’t purposefully and expressly mention in the FAQ, our website, and other places of the plugin that this is the default behavior, and that you need to sign up for Geniuslink in order to receive affiliate commissions, I’d agree with you. However, I think we try very hard to be completely transparent.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the above, of if there’s any other concerns you have. I’m also happy to jump on email, or the phone to answer any other questions. Our goal as a company is to help you earn more affiliate revenue – not take it from you.
Feel free to reach out to me directly at cl [at] geni [dot] us if you’d like to go either of those routes and as we are Seattle based as well, I’ll make myself available during your normal work hours.
Thanks for your time so far.
Cheers,
Cole Lakes
Director of Operations | Geniuslink.
