Dilbert's Guide To Affiliate Marketing

This soooo sums up affiliate marketing at the moment:









It doesn't take a rant from me to say why.

The sad thing is that the authors (United Media) have their own "Dilbert moment". If you look at their "offical linking icons" page (just the name made me chuckle) you get the the "License Agreement":

"DILBERT" OFFICIAL ICON LINK LICENSE AGREEMENT

License. United Feature Syndicate grants to anyone using one of its DILBERT Icons (License) the non-exclusive right, until UFS gives notice to the contrary, to place the Icon in Licensee's web site, subject to the following conditions:
(a) the Icon may be used only for the purpose of hyperlinking to UFS's sites at "http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/" and/or "http://www.dilbert.com";
(b) Licensee will not alter the appearance of the Icon in any manner; and (c) Licensee will make no use of any intellectual property of UFS, other than the Icon, without UFS's express written permission.

You're not even allowed to deeplink to a particular comic strip! I've only recently commented on this sort of stupidity. I'll deep link to who I want. There's no legal prescedent and if I find something useful to my readers here I'll bloody-well link to it if want.

What they should be doing is creating an RSS feed of their comic strips, allowing people to promote it easily throughout the intenet and increasing the footfall to their Dilbert shop. I'm sure they'd increase sales massively!