Digital Playground Prohit You From Using Keywords!
 

Just got this from my mailbox. Just thought it was interesting ....

Several companies don't allow this... nothing new

very common in mainstream, rarer in adult.

Only a fucking idiot would have a policy like this. But most program owners are idiots.

almost all mainstream aff programs (esp big brand names) have a similar policy

In adult all this does is ensure you share search results with torrents and tubes with your own content on them INSTEAD of affiliate sites sending you sales.

YES it is listed for adwords, but nobody with a clue about SEO will ever push them.

Sure it's brand protection, but it's not protecting shit when you force the hands of google. They have no choice but to fill up the other 9 spots on a page with other sites, and if affiliates can't do it legally, who do you think those other results will be?

Great brand protection.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

is dd1gitalplAygroundd still ok i need clarification.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Digital Playground have some of the best content, but their program is a joke. For years the voice in their movie FHG's were out of sync with the movie - that is IF the FHG was loading to begin with.

The people in charge are/were clueless. I heard they had a new team taking over the affiliate program, but I have heard that one before.

Did they really give 0 day notice or was this posted earlier? :disgust

Seems fair otherwise. At least they aren't bitching about people ranking high in the organic results.

Oh wait. Scratch that. They are bitching about what you use for an url? Fuck them.

lol what a losers ... another way how to fight with less sales ... not work harder, but fuck with your affiliates ... fuck off digital playground idiots. you have no copyright on typos or so, so i hope everyone who have some typo or seo traffic will point your traffic to other sponsors ... ass will get what ass deserve

"we sucks at seo so affiliates are making almost all of our sales, what to do?" "i checked one affiliate, he stole our sales from google, he is on top and he make sales, our sales!" "ok, fuck him, lets ban him and we will get the sales then, woohoo lets rock like in 1998!"

Some sponsors are just assholes. Unfortunately it seems to be on the rise.

So which is it, affiliates cannot bid on them at all or cannot bid above above position 3?

Personally, I don't see any problem with prohibiting affiliates from bidding on their trademarks and misspellings. As others have said, it's common practice with large mainstream affiliate programs.

TeenCat, you should learn the difference between a copyright and a trademark, because your comments sound very ignorant.

yes i am lame in this and with my engrish i am using words that are similar to what i want to say, anyway i know what hard work is and what digitalplayground is doing is just a fuck off to affiliates who knows more than them. for me doesnt matter how is it called, it is just saying fuck off clever affiliates, we dont need you and your long time build traffic ... :2 cents:

anyway, its seventh day here with no sun, just rain and under heavy clouds, so i am nervous and aggressive like a shit and is better to do not talk and to get drunk, excuse everyone, i am not happy with myself last few fucking days ... :upsidedow

Digital playground actually own the term 'virtual sex' as a trademark.

what a bunch of fucking losers, another program on the DO NOT PROMOTE LIST!

This is nothing new and DP is simply protecting its Brand nothing more nothing less.

When your paying on average 46% more per click to bid on your own name something has to be done to protect your brand. The notice says that Affiliates can still bid on terms up to position 3.

Your 100% correct!

lol ... it tooks you many years to get something to your brain ... protecting by stealing traffic from your hard working affiliates ... it is not affiliates problem that you are going down ... :321GFY

I am sorry your having a bad day but don't take that out on us. We have nothing against Affiliates nor are we trying to screw anyone. In the notice I offered to help anyone that asks and we still allow Affiliates to bid up to position 3.

I can understand not wanting to bid on your company name, but on pornstar names? Really? I guess they don't want traffic to their model names. Bye bye.
WG

I have been under the radar while things were being fine tuned. I have 12 years of experience in the business and I am slowly getting things back on track. I have worked for Hustler, Playboy, AEBN and Adult Friend Finder. I have a lot to offer any Affiliate that wants to work with us. All my contact info is below hit me up I am always around. Our new Affiliate program and new sites are launching soon so stay tuned this should be a good ride.

"display URLs" means on Google adsense (aka "fake url"). You are not referring to the actual url itself, correct?

The model names are Registered Trademarks. They are our brands. Why pay thousands of dollars to protect something if anyone can use it to promote whatever they want? Would you pay almost 50% more to bid on a term you own? And again if you read the notice Affiliates can still bid on terms up to position 3.

Let me be 100% clear here because it seems that a lot of people are having trouble with this. Affiliates CAN bid up to position 3.

We cannot have people using digitalplayground.com, jessejane.com etc as their display and/or actual urls. the reason being when you use those urls in paid search you are blacking out our actual paid search efforts. google will only serve one ad per actual site and a re-direct that ends on digitalplayground.com is considered exactly the same as our actual paid search efforts for digitalplayground.com
you can direct link on efforts that are not paid search related, but this just relates to paid search efforts.

fuckers, you build up their brand and then they want all juice just for them...

@theharvman,

Are u going to get GFY to remove this thread because I post your trademark "Digital Playground" on the title?

Just 2 points of clarification, the Digital Playground "Brand" has been around for 18 Years. Long before an Affiliate Program was even thought of. We have spent Millions of dollars on PR, Advertising, Marketing and Promotions to build what we now have. Sure Affiliate marketing has played a role in our success but by no means the only reason for it.

If you read the notice or read the multiple times in the thread that this fact is mentioned Affiliates CAN still bid up to position 3.

What we are doing is cleaning up our affiliate program so that it's not negatively affecting our internal search efforts. Since we have begun to expand our search program we have identified that our quality scores are being negatively impacted and in many cases we are not being shown on our brand keywords because our affiliates are running rampant. The keywords directly tied to this issue include our brand terms as well as all of their misspellings. These are keywords that should convert for us at pennies on the dollar so it's not cost effective to have affiliates charging us a transaction fee when we could be receiving these sales ourselves. Our search efforts are a major part of our internal strategy and due to this we are cleaning up our affiliate program.
Bidding on the keyword dd1gitalplAygroundd or any other misspelling is not allowed. This directly ties to a user who is looking for digitalplayground.com and thereby they should click on our brand paid listing. As outlined bidding on our brand keywords or any misspellings are no longer allowed.
you need to decide whether or not you want affiliates buying domains of your misspellings
they could impact your seo because they could cause duplicate content or just write better content and out rank you for your own keywords
they can also take up more space on some of your keywords which could be a good thing
so it's up to you.

By pissing affilliates off and having them leave your program for your competition? REAL fucking smart. Fucking brilliant. You know if your so fucking good at promting your own shit why do you need affiliates in the first place? Think that over and let me know when you get a clue.

I wonder where they have been when another idiot program did this a while ago. Not to mention the other program was never successful in taking down the biggest site that they claim to infringe on their trademark. Don't they ever learn? The bad publicity and backlash they get from the very people who support their program is more damaging they trying to protect shitty fuck word that doesn't even spell right.

I?m sorry to hear your feelings, we obviously do not want you to leave our program. As I said previously we have increased our search efforts and affiliates just picking up our brand traffic is not cost effective to our business.

Our actual paid search program would be capturing those conversions if it wasn?t for the fact that some affiliates are keeping us from showing at all due to Google?s policies. Trademark restrictions are a common practice in affiliate marketing and while these are in place going forward we are happy to have you continue to drive conversions for us through other measures.

you have no possitions on first page google, some affiliates have. now, you will lost also the affiliates possitions, and the possitions will be replaced by warez and tube sites ... go, enjoy your business, go but it will be short run ... boooom! :error

Harvey Kaplan is a mobile marketing genius . . . :firehair

COMMON don't mean smart. It's like I buy a McDonald's franchise and McDonald's says I can advertise in the local paper as long as I don't use the name McDonald's or use their logo or other trademarks.

I respect the fact you want to protect your model names from mis-use, but the idea behind a TM is to build a brand behind the name and encourage your affiliates to promote your content so long as its done in a manner that improves your brand.

While I know the idea behind this is to keep your own costs down such that you don't compete with affiliates (hence why you'd allow positions 3-10 to be openly bid on), I think you'll find over time this will encourage webmasters to promote other sites that have your models content licensed (ie: Jesse Jane) on the landing page or members area.

Like others have pointed out in this thread, this isn't anything new but take it from someone who's been buying PPC traffic for over 10 years, you'll find out that affiliates would rather take their business elsewhere than have their hands tied.

WG

Trademark restrictions are a common practice for affiliate marketing and not unique to Digital Playground. Affiliates with unique content who are providing a value by driving traffic to there own unique are welcome. We are just not going to have people hijack our Trademarked terms.

When did you start doing PPC Harvey?

We are not trying to tie anyones hands we are trying to control our brand to the best of our ability. There is nothing preventing Affiliates from promoting any of the other 600+ girls we have on our site. This is simply Trademark issue.

This is what you keep repeating, and honestly, it is what is making me laugh the most

Sorry to break it to you but this is 2010, not adwords year one

There is a whole bunch of adwords metrics an affiliate has zero control over, ads with low bids can be displayed sporadically in position 1, go to 5 for a while, back to 2...it is IMPOSSIBLE to bid for position 3.

Thats why I asked him when he started doing Pay Per Click.

We are not saying that you cannot bid you can but you need to stay below position 3. You can not pose as our brand and take our traffic.

Can't you see why people are upset? You can protect your TM from abuse, no one is complaining. But using your TM to take profits away from the very own people who support and made you successful all these years is like giving your good friend a stab in the back.

I suggest you guys reconsider.

Then you can safely bid from 4-10 and so on. applying pressure to our program, which raises all of our cost per clicks is not beneficial to anyone

Your missing the point Harvey. I can take a nickel bid and go to number 1 in adwords with pornstar terms in google simply by turning it on.

Sara Jay comes to mind just from this week alone.

My personal adwords account is almost 7 years old and loyalty has its rewards.

Did you go to the DirtyD school for adwords?