Just another day in the life.
Late last year, the FTC decided that online publishers need to disclose any hidden interests or unspoken biases to their readers when they publish product reviews and/or recommendations. In the past couple of months the FTC’s guidelines have become a little more clear, so we’re devoting a day of airtime today to our Product Review Policy and FTC Disclosure, and we’ll build a link to this disclosure into every future product review, for your reading pleasure.
Product Review Policy
- We only write positive things about products we actually like.
- Yes, most of our reviews are mostly positive. That’s because if we don’t like a product much, we just don’t review it. We think that there are enough great fly fishing products out there that there’s no need to waste time on products that we don’t like.
FTC Disclosure
We’ll try to be thorough. As it relates to any review that you read on our web site, please assume that the product’s manufacturers, sales representatives, dealers and/or others with a financial interest in the product being reviewed may have done any combination of the following:
- Sent us products at no cost to review and then send back to them.
- Sent us products at no cost to review and then keep.
- Sent us products to keep even if we don’t review them.
- Taken us fishing and then refused our offer for gas money.
- Bought us beer.
- Bought us other alcohol drinks, and/or non-alcohol drinks, and/or food.
- Given us loads of money (see, everyone in fly fishing is just raking it in right now) [note to FTC and IRS: the preceding phrase in parentheses is a joke].
- Been friends with us.
- Visited one or more of our lodges.
- Told other people that they should fish at our lodges.
- Caught more fish than us while fishing at one or more of our lodges.
- Yelled at us for blowing easy shots at tarpon (sorry, some of those industry folks are real jerks, but we digress).
- Featured us in their sales and marketing literature, and/or other publications, online and/or not.
- Paid us outrageous referral fees for sending customers to them.
- Hosted us in their homes.
- Generally been nice to us, with the expectation that we’ll write good things about their products, or not.
We feel so much better now that everything’s out in the open. Thanks for reading our blog.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Product rep sounds like a pretty sweet job!
How do you feel about letting me plagarize from your disclosure statement for the one I need to do for my site? I could start from scratch, but you make it so easy for me not to….
Not a problem Allison – have at it. Some sort of attribution back would be great.
Well…, we finally now know what “rules” to follow apropos of product submissions.
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