How WordPress Secretly Turned Bloggers Into Affiliate Marketers
When discussing affiliate marketing, I noted that some of my chagrin with the practice is that affiliate marketers often posture as objective reviewers, but that the nature of their relationship to reviewed products, wherein money only transfers hands when a purchase is made, disincentivizes true criticism and engagement with these products. A negative review won’t inspire purchase, and so will leave the affiliate marketer to starve.
Well then, if we could have an affiliate marketer who didn’t know that they were doing affiliate marketing, we might be able to salvage the practice: they would no longer be influenced by this economic relationship, and they could review objectively.
Let’s talk about WordPress, and how it quietly added affiliate tracking links to blogs for almost a decade.
WordPress users on the platform’s free, ad-supported tier had their links to select retailers automatically replaced by affiliate marketing links. All revenue made from these links supported Automattic, WordPress’s parent company.
For proof, you can read this forum post from 2018. WordPress used Skimlinks, a plugin which finds links to products on a page, identifies if there is an eligible affiliate marketing campaign associated with that product and vendor, and replaces the link with an affiliate tracking link coordinated by Skimlinks. So, for example, if you liked a book and you linked to its Amazon page so that your readers could buy it, Skimlinks would replace that normal Amazon link with an affiliate tracking link. WordPress would then collect a commission if your readers bought the linked book. Skimlinks worked invisibly, and I don’t believe that WordPress users were aware of this bait-and-switch in the background, as evidenced by the numerous posts on WordPress’s support forum over the years asking why their links had been switched. Here’s one from 2013, 2017, and another from 2017. This frightened user from 2012 was convinced that their blog had been hijacked with parasitic code.
To my knowledge, WordPress no longer does this. I cannot find any new posts referencing swapped links. Furthermore, it does look like WordPress used to explicitly mention their use of Skimlinks for free-tier blogs on their terms of service, at least, should this post be believed. That WordPress no longer mentions Skimlinks in their terms of service suggests they have ended this practice.
Yet, I find no press release, no announcement, of this change, and therefore cannot verify it. Likely, the practice died as quietly as it lived, unknown to the millions of users who had with great stealth seen their blogs parasitized with affiliate marketing. I don’t know what kind of money WordPress made with this program. I doubt anyone of us here on the outside ever will.