[mtlynch]

Thanks for reading!

Basically, you just agreed to settle and not continue to press your valid claims of potential affiliate fraud.

What would have been a better course of action?

Even under the most optimistic estimates, they owed me less than $500. I don't have access to their sales data, so I don't have hard proof that they're committing fraud. The company's legal team could just turn around and say, "Oh, our rep was mistaken when they said we're not following our own policy. We actually do pay according to our published agreement, but you didn't make any sales during that time period."

I could have pursued options for some sort of class action lawsuit with subpoenas for their sales data, but that's a much bigger time and financial commitment than I wanted to put in.

[rexreed]

Well first of all, do you plan to continue to do business with this unscrupulous company?

Second, what is your general position on business ethics? If you get yours, then is it ok for them to be potentially screwing others? Basically are you of the perspective that as long as you're taken care of, who cares about the others?

You're right, a class action would be the result here, and maybe it's not worth it for this fleabag of a company and the potential outcome you might get.

But I think you might want to rethink what this article is about.

This article, despite the title and claims has little to do with a professional note-taking approach. Rather it's "How I uncovered potential affiliate fraud, and I agreed to settle with them for a small amount rather than fight them."

[mtlynch]

>Well first of all, do you plan to continue to do business with this unscrupulous company?

I don't. I stopped doing business with them after the exchange with the co-founder.

>Second, what is your general position on business ethics? If you get yours, then is it ok for them to be potentially screwing others? Basically are you of the perspective that as long as you're taken care of, who cares about the others?

I do care about the others, but I also don't think I'm obligated to spend months/years of my life leading a class-action lawsuit on their behalf.

Short of that, I don't have a good way of contacting their other affiliates at scale. I directly reached out to some of the affiliates they feature as success stories, and I reached out to other keto bloggers, but none of them were that interested in talking to me. I think there's so much shady behavior in keto affiliate advertising that the affiliates either (a) didn't care about the particulars as long as their absolute payout was decent and/or (b) didn't want to engage with a random blogger they don't know who's possibly just a disgruntled affiliate.

I wrote the article so that anyone who Googles the affiliate program will find out about their behavior. This is pretty outside the subject matter of my normal blog posts. If I was looking to write something that would appeal to lots of readers, I'd write about my usual subjects of solo entrepreneurship or software development.

What obligations do you feel I'm failing to meet here?

[xeromal]

Exactly. If you start slinging shit, who knows if they try to get you for slander. Even if it doesn't stick, it'll cost you time and money fighting it. I believe your approach was perfect. You were able to assert your rights with them and they complied. Mission accomplished.