Ethics of Pin Submit Offers (21)
Hey everyone,
Today while looking through offer list that AM sent me, I kind of got a weird feeling. There was couple of PIN Submit offers, I looked through them and felt really bad for those people that were signing up for them. Why? Because there is 0 real benefit from that subscription. Like none!
Lets take some random PIN submit offer in Ghana, people in Ghana are really struggling, and we put them on a subscription that will dig their hole even bigger.. It just feels very wrong. Most of the people who will sign up are not the brightest minds, and instead of helping them we trick them into thinking that magical subscription will heal their phone battery..
yeah, You could say that they could read what they are subscribing for, but we all know how much reading anyone does.
I can understand and work with a lot of grey marketing tactics, but PIN submits is just plain dumb.
I dont know.. I might be too soft for PIN Submits, I just feel bad for those poor people..
Once you start hitting +1k/day, greed will take over.
But quick and dirty money is never a sustainable business.
When it comes to money, one thing I have learned is that people can rationalise anything.
But as with many aspects of life, you always have a choice.
I personally believe taking advantage of people, especially those who are poor, is not cool.
Your thoughts explains thats why so hard and needed to be aggressive for conversions.
-0 benefits for user
-Users are billed weekly till they realize that bills
-They got nothing for clicking that.
But wait.. This kind of offers are runned with an aggreement of carriers. Why that carriers letting them to run?
Originally Posted by halilb
But why do they let such things to happen? I would suspect that they are getting their fair share too. Like 30-50% i would guess.
EDIT:
I think this model is not that bad overall, and thats why it is allowed, just that a lot of companies are taking advantage and not giving any benefits for those subscribers.
This would all be ok if there was really good, valuable content to download or some good resources to access. But to tell that weird subscription for 6 EUR a week will help to protect from viruses is just ... !
If you don't send them a popup, they are still going to end up signing up to another person's popup. The type of person to signup to something like this is just going to continue getting duped and sold to. So is it going to be you to make the money or the next marketer?
I realize that yes it is probably morally wrong to promote these offers, but at the same time, that person has to make their own decisions, and that person is probably going to signup to something else anyway. Right now I am being selfish and looking after myself. Once I am doing well and on my feet then maybe I'll look into other verticals, but even then, you think all those nutra supplements perform miracles?
I think this industry as a whole can have a negative vibe to it but it's all your perception.
Also, you don't have to target those countries if you feel bad for them. You could always target tier 1 countries where people "have more money". Or you could get into FB or other marketing where you can target demographics better and give people things they actually want/need.
I think the whole pops/pins thing is just a great segue into marketing for me. I don't know if I will be doing it forever but it's definitely a good way to learn the ropes.
Sorry for rambling.
Cheers,
Brad
Most of affiliate marketing is shady, at least the kind we are involved with.. no matter how you try to spin it.
Then you could get into most of all marketing is shady. Every professional or service out there is trying to take your money.
Originally Posted by nomeus
Although these offers are not the nicest of offers for the user, I don't think they are unethical. Why
1. The offer should inform the user that billing will take place on weekly basis. Offers that don't inform the user on this are illegal. Pin submits are highly regulated by government rules and laws.
2. The user has a free choice whether or not to engage with the ad. Most pin submit offers won't let you run misleading ads (although lots of affiliates love to break the rules and get away with it, and still get paid). Nobody is forcing the user to opt-in.
3. If you don't run the traffic, someone else will. Anyways that same user will get billed.
4. The user can unscubsribe at any given moment when he/she sees fit
5. And most importantly, there are things in live that are way more and way more unethical. Think about politics, panama papers, isis, tobacco/drugs/alcohol companies, and another 100 things. PIN SUBMIT is an angel compared to all of this.
You can always sell more bear-blinding military grade flashlights... 
I was looking at this exactly the same way as you do, its true to an extent, we shouldnt behave as assholes who exploit the poor.But, we live in a world that is ruled by laws, we may like some, we might hate some, but its the law that sets what it allowed and what is not. PIN submits are not illegal. There are terms of use and the user has to agree to them.
They dont read them and they are not the brightest minds? True. But let me tell you something, the last 10 years out of 12, my country is ruled by a party that is stealing like there is no tomorrow. The prime minister is a damn liar and a thief. All of us with brighter minds know that and vote against that party, but the not-so-bright people buy his nice talks, the BS welfare he does like free trains for old people, 50 eur payment for xmass etc, when at the same time they hand out state biz to friendly companies and grow their wealth by stealing from everyone, including the dumb people who who vote for them. Somehow, the party always manages to get enough votes that all they need is one more party that they bribe and rule for another 4 years, just like it just happened a month ago, so we are fucked for the next 4 years to come. Its the dumb people who keep him in charge. They raised the taxes, social security payments, health insurance payments ... the dumb people who voted for this party over and over fuck up my country and directly take money out of my pocket. But they are not doing anything against the law, we have a democracy and their vote counts just as mine does.
So I have to accept it and do my own thing. So if not-so-bright people have the power to decide what is going on with my country and directly influence how much money my own family will miss because of them, I have the right to get some moneny back from them by selling them a PIN submit 
And there is more : I pay a ton of money for stuff I dont want and nobody asked me about: income taxes, all kinds of mandatory insurance policies, VAT, state TV ... The there is a ton of stuff I buy and dont know if its worth anything at all : half of the drugs the docs prescribe, vitamin suplements ...
We live in a world where the money has to circulate and BS offers/products are part of the cycle. I stay away from anything that is illegal, but I stopped judging what is morally right or not, we have the authorities to decide
Thank you everyone for engaging.
Although I can agree with most of comments here, that marketing in general is to sell you shit that most likely you dont need, there are points that I dont agree.
Before I turned to AM, friend of mine offered to participate in a little "scheme", to benefit from some loopholes in taxes laws (very common thing here). Although payout was pretty nice, I declined. And he told me the same thing:
"A lot of people are doing it successfully, If I will not, then someone else will take that money!"
I view this a bit similarly, the difference is that this is legal, that scheme - not that much.
But thank you everyone for insights, You guys softened me up a little bit. Everyone is responsible for themselves, If you dont take care of yourself, then nobody else will.
I mean that if those who sign up is not responsible enough to read what they sign up for, then maybe that will teach them to read next time. At least some benefit.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Regards to those who rule in country, the same thing is happening here. Stealing is so open that no one is even really surprised when another couple millions go to some prime ministers sons company. And on the next election? Somehow everyone has forgotten about that.
Sometimes I get this feeling that I can change some of that. And maybe I will try to do that some day.
I got cold-called in the morning after starting up my biz entity and talked through something adn suddenly I had confirmed to buy a listing in a bs catalogue online for $400. Their angle was they were from some government entity just to "confirm my information". I suspected nothing and went with it then 5 minutes later went "oh shi..". I gave them hell and they eventually budged and canceled the invoice.
The company that did this is the market leader in my country, they are a "legit" business, with employees, currently hiring more. They have shareholders, all that shit. They cold call people and get them to sign up, all they do is create a little profile for them which takes 5 minutes. Most people who sign up probably think it is useful because it is supposedly getting them more customers.
And how about McDonalds, Burger King, Coca Cola and all those doing anything they can to keep people consuming more and more and more of it, causing massive harm to some peoples health and life quality on a large scale, huge costs in healthcare and so on.
For a PIN submit the actual price paid isn't even that bad. When I was 10-12, all the kids were signing up for mobile pin-submits for cool games, wallpapers, ringtones etc it was kinda like Pokemon cards - useless but there was still a certain charm to it. This one kid managed to spend about $100 on random bs and got it all detracted from his allowance. Wonder how big of a % of the pin-submit leads are kids signing up
Dude..... Ive seen FARRRRR worse.
A few bucks is nothing.
A few bucks wont change anyones lifestyle.
Money itself is fairly meaningless. What use is a lamborghini? Why does someone really need a big house? A swimming pool? Why? Material things are meaningless.
At the end of the day, people will eat. People will sleep. People will love, have kids, etc.
People who earn $250/month do these things, and so do people who earn $250k/month.
Making money is a game of confidence.
If you want $250k/month, you can have it.
No matter what age, education level, social status, religion, etc. People are doing it every day.
If you want 250k/month, you wont be afraid to ask people for money...
You wont be afraid to get PIN submit conversions...
You wont be afraid to surround yourself with other millionaires...
The kid who founded snapchat spent $4000 on indian developers to create the first prototype of the app (i know this bc we have mutual friends and we hang out at the same places).
They got a couple of thousand of users in the first few months, (who knows if all those people were real or incentivized or not)...
A reasonable person might try and list that app on Flippa for like $10,000 and considered it a win. 250% ROI! Thats a business right there!!!
A person with a slightly higher standard for themself might seek seed funding of like $25,000. Wow! Now you officially have a 'startup', a real company! On your way!
What the founders did, was they approached ONLY billionaires, and they asked for $50 MILLION.
Thats fuckin ballsy.
...for an app that had no revenues? That sounds like a fishy deal. But it happened.
People will only ever get as much money as they believe they deserve.
I say this, because you might want to reflect on your attitudes in regards to money.
I would check out some material by tony robbins, t harv eker, or others
Ive found that a persons attitudes, and goals around money, are a massive factor in determining their success. Everyone in life gets a few serious opportunities to make a shitload of money, and become mega-wealthy. Most people self-sabotage, and never follow-through on these opportunities. Dont be that person!
CMDEAL, and Halib called it... people will rationalize anything just to make money. I'm not gonna pretend to be some kind of moral compass judge.. nor am I judging anyone for what they promote (I've promoted my fair share of Blackhat shit many moons ago)... but don't hide behind all this justification.
You promote what you do, they way you do it, because it makes you money.
Bottom line is: if you're uncomfortable with running something, don't run it, don't let someone talk you into running it... and don't judge anyone for their decisions.
Before I go any further, the topics of ethics and morality are so deep and complex, that I doubt any of us can do it justice with our posts, however it's a great and interesting topic for discussion and always gets me thinking and evaluating my views.
I spent my first few years growing up in Ghana, so that's another reason this thread caught my eye I can confirm from first hand experience that unexpected expenses hit people in 3rd world countries very hard and you can't apply your experience and realities as someone in a 1st world country to a person in the 3rd world. There are certain things you can't simply "mindset" your way out of.
For extra context, I wasn't from a poor family, but even something as common as eating an apple was a treat that we didn't get often and it was always cut and shared amongst everyone. Even in the city, there was no guarantee of running water or electricity every day.
Going back to the topic of ethics and morality, in the grand scheme of things, I don't think we can go a single day without doing something that's ethically wrong, or partaking in something that sustains actions that are ethically wrong. Eg I'm sure some shady things happened and continue to happen in the manufacturing of the phone I'm using to write this. Should I quit using cell phones? Or figure out a way to create some good from my use of the phone?
In the competitive, profit seeking world we live in, the low hanging fruit (people who don't have the full picture due to ignorance, deception, blindness due to greed etc) are always going to be attractive for exploitation by someone.
So it's hard to see any kind of visible positive impact by just deciding to not promote an offer based on moral grounds, because in general that means less competition for someone who has no problems with doing it.
But that should not force you to give up on your personal ethics and morals.
Personally, this was one of the many reasons why I "retired" from being a traditional "cpa affiliate" in 2009. I switched to building software and making aff money promoting relevant offers such as hosting, marketing tools and subscriptions to forums such as STM etc.
But then the other question that comes up is, what if the pin submit money allows you to do something that eventually changes the quality of life of millions or billions of people? Like funding for the cure to a terrible disease? Or a program that reduces poverty?
Life is simply too complex and interconnected to ever really look at all this in a simple black/white manner. No one has all the answers.
We are all at different levels of knowledge, understanding, and growth. It's not productive to morally judge people and their actions, none of us are perfect.
We have all made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes till the day we die.
We are all people currently stuck together on this big blue earth, interconnected (according to Facebook https://research.facebook.com/blog/t...of-separation/) by 3.5 degrees of separation and shrinking. It means what you do online and offline affects real people, with needs, wants, fears, hopes and problems just like you. It also means the effects of what you do hit closer to home than you realize.
Every action you take has a positive, negative or neutral result. I can't or won't tell anyone what's right and wrong but I have no issues telling you to think deeper about your actions and follow the path that feels right and good to you. Independent of what everyone is doing or if a law says it's not illegal.
My current main guiding rule in life is to harm as few people as possible, while helping as many people (including myself) as I possible.
I hate this thinking about if you dont steal others will steal.its like if you dont rape other will rape........
Originally Posted by dexture
With 7 billion people in the world, unfortunately it's very likely that there will be people doing something that's harmful to others even if you don't do the same.
So I've come to accept that fact, BUT I don't let that get me into thinking that I should do something I'm not morally ok with just because someone else is going to do it if I don't do it. Especially true when it comes to money, I have seen the worst in people because of the blind pursuit of money at any cost.
Like you mentioned if everyone had that mentality, we'd be in a pretty messed up world.
Originally Posted by Mr Baffoe
"Just because some other kids do, and just because you can, doesn't mean you should"
If you personally have a greater purpose for every dollar that you are given, i think that factors into things massively.
If your intent is to be selfish with the money, like buy a lamborghini, that could be bad.
But if your intent is to use that dollar in a leveraged helpful way, such as to help your family, employ people, build something greater, i believe thats good.
Unfortunately, were not unique as human beings.
We are not special little snowflakes.
There are 7billion of us.
In the capitalistic system, we are commodities. Market forces Will take over. Someone Will get those tech support conversions on popads.
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