Sparkpeople Offers Incentives For Google Clicks?

[Discovery]

You decide if this is incentive based marketing by Sparkpeople.
I like the Sparkpeople business model. I also understand what they are attempting to do with this marketing campaign and honestly I think its pretty clever. However if its not an incentive based click campaign then it is dangerously close.

What do you think?


http://www.junkclick.com/images/sparkincentive.jpg

Here are the details of the offer:
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/motivation_articles.asp?id=535

Here is the Google web search page:
http://www.sparkpeople.com/myspark/web_search.asp

What makes this issue interesting is that the incentive is for SparkPeople Points, which have no real value, just like a "Sphinn it" ranking, its a perceived value.


Discovery

[chris1]

"You will earn one SparkPoint each day that you use the SparkPeople WebSearch—yet another way to stay motivated!" Everything else they are doing seems fine, but this seems not to be in the best interest of Google or its advertisers. I could see this not being a big deal however since all someone needs to do to get the incentive seems to be to perform 1 search per day. Thats really not going to cause too much of a problem. Obviously, the hope is that people just use the SparkPeople search for more searching since they are already there.

[Discovery]

I think this is where they lead their members to believe, hey if you click on ads then we get money and you get free services.

SparkPeople is a Winner!

SparkPeople earns a share of Google’s revenue from all searches that involve a click to an advertiser’s site. This helps pay for our expenses, like new servers and salaries for our team. Best of all, this helps us get closer to our mission of helping millions of people reach their goals, using health and fitness as a springboard to success!


Millions of Others are Winners!

Additional revenues will help us keep the SparkPeople site and program free for millions of people around the world. So, you are helping us help them!

What if I put a promotion on our website and told all my clients that if they used Google search on my site and clicked on ads and that the additional revenues to my company from these ads will help keep our service prices low cost or free for them? Okay, perhaps I'll give them DiscoveryPoints too! Would that violate Google adsense terms? If not, I'm ready to roll!

You should also note that SparkPeople is in the same impression category as Friendster and MySpace according to Google's site targeting estimates.

Discovery

[jimbeetle]

Hmmm, knowing the folks who read this forum I'd say the answer as to whether this is incentivizing or soliciting clicks will become apparent if the program is still active in a day or so.

[abbottsys]

Their statement, "SparkPeople earns a share of Google’s revenue from some searches" says it all. Just another twist on the old MFA concept.

[Mel66]

I think this is in violation of the Adsense TOS. AWR, can you weigh in on this?

[GrantM]

Hey thanks for the feedback on this program. Since SparkPoints have no value (can never be exchanged for prizes, etc.), and are only incentives for the search and not the click, we think this should be okay. Nevertheless, we adjusted the language on the details page to remove the connection between clicks and supporting SparkPeople.

http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/motivation_articles.asp?id=535

Regards,

GrantM

[AussieWebmaster]

Even with those word changes you are breaching Google's T&Cs. You are gaining profit from people clicking for you. You promote advertisers other than Google but know the more traffic the more you make at Google.

It does not matter if you are raising money for charity, using it to keep the site free etc. You are promoting clicking

[Discovery]

Hi Grant and welcome to SEW,

It didn't seem to me that SparkPeople was intentionally trying to game Adsense. However, there are many adsense participants that are always seeking ways to "push the envelope". Your clever marketing may have set a presedence for them.

Please take this as constructive critisism. The changes you have made don't seem to have changed the nature of the promotion enough to be in line with Adsense's T and C's.

There are a lot of adsense partners that do this type of thing, but SparkPeople is a higher profile target for critisism. You should probably remove any mention of benefit to your members by using Google searches, accept that they will get great results. The ad rev will simply happen from there.


Regards - Discovery

[Discovery]

Sheesh Grant, sorry to pile on here.

I just thought while you're editing that page you may want to take a second look at your 2 million members promotion which reads:

"SparkPeople Just Recently Crossed 2 Million Members"

That may give the wrong impression...you might want to say

"SparkPeople hits the 2 million member mark!"

Sorry we're a bunch of marketers that spend our days trying to convey complex products and services in 70 characters or less.

Discovery

[abbottsys]

....Sorry we're a bunch of marketers that spend our days trying to convey complex products and services in 70 characters or less.Discovery
Actually, 95 including the headline. Life in 25/35/35 format is always interesting. I wonder how much could *really* be achieved in the adwords format (ad, essay, poem, novel?).. someone should run a contest :)

[djheilmann]

I work with GrantM at SparkPeople. We talked about this today and decide to change our pages some more:
- We changed our main search page to remove language about helping SparkPeople -- http://sparkpeople.com/myspark/web_search.asp
- We deleted the article talking about Google search helping SparkPeople

Dave H