Our Disclosures
All businesses have vendors. When we transact with a vendor and they have earned our trust and our business, as we have become their ACTUAL customers, we try and see if they have an affiliate program and so that’s how we get into partnership.
We then can write about them or recommend them, based on our own experiences as their business customer. As their “business affiliate”, we are given affiliate links and codes to put on our articles in our website. Should any of our website visitors click an affiliate link to these vendor’s website which results in a sale, Accentrio and / or AGDTechnology will earn a commission, with the use of “affiliate codes and affiliate links”.
That’s how the internet works and do business – also through the marketing and the efforts of affiliates who “put in the code” on those links.
The FTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) wants Affiliates to declare so, when they are recommending a product, so that consumers would know “whether the recommendation is driven by the idea of the commission / money that can be earned, from another company, or whether it is just an honest to goodness review of a product.”
The FTC requires that Affiliates of whatever product, puts on verbiage on the article, that in effect notifies the consumer or website visitor, that their link, if it results in a sale, will also result in a commission that will be earned.
As of 2015, we have not done anything on the “affiliates side of the business”, in fact we published posts that said we will “pause our affiliate business”. And we have. The issue is we decided to not even continue that any more and just focus on our own business.
We are putting this disclosure because we have a whole lot of old articles that recommended companies that we “USED-TO” be affiliated with, but presently, we DO NOT anymore. We have also stopped being customers of these companies / vendors. Our articles, web content, designs and graphics, source codes, and other digital assets, however, from previous domain names, have been moved and archived at the agdtechnology.com domain.
These previous companies were good companies, but sometimes, one has to consider the bottom line and the resources it requires, both in time, people and money, and then make an informed decision on whether to continue or not. We are customers too, and can make our own informed decision, whether to continue or not. Goodwill is important to us.
We are placing this Disclosure Statement here, because we have decided to still continue to publish our old articles. If any of our website visitors decide to purchase anything through those links, we will NO LONGER earn commissions from those sales, because we are NO LONGER affiliates. (Does this work like a “reverse disclosure”? 🙂 )
Truth in advertising.
We are putting this here also, as a reminder for us to include, in the future, verbiage that in case we decide to go in partnership with another vendor, to PUT that we are affiliates as well.
As of right now, the only vendor that we are an affiliate of, is BlueHost, because that is where we ALSO host our websites, since 2015. And people always ask us where we host our websites. (We earn a commission, at no extra cost to you, if you decide to use their services using this BlueHost link.). 🙂
Updated 6/17/2018.