Registry Cleaners, Affiliate Marketing and a Crisis of Conscience
Question: If a product doesn’t do what it claims, would you promote it or sell it?
This is the very question that I’ve faced over the last day or so with “Registry Cleaners”. Here are my thoughts and the questions that I’ve had to answer in my own mind as to whether to promote these products.
The registry is a huge file in Microsoft Windows that is responsible for keeping track of your installed software and internal operations of Windows. It has been much maligned over the years as being responsible for computer crashes and slow downs. As a result, there are numerous software companies offering products that claim to “clean” or fix the registry.
Registry cleaning products are big business and the opportunity for promoting and selling Registry Cleaners as a affiliate marketer are huge. Type in “Registry” or “Slow PC” into Google and you’ll be bombarded by advertisements (or “Sponsored Links”) comparing and reviewing registry cleaners. Ultimately, all of these sites are either the registry cleaner software companies themselves or affiliate sites that receive commissions from sales. A typical affiliate commission for a successful sale of one of the popular online products is around $31. Sell 10 (quite possible in a day!), and you make $310. Not bad!
I am in somewhat of an interesting place. On one hand, I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over 5 years now and have made a living out of it. On the other hand, I am technically qualified (Microsoft Certified Professional in systems, software and server products) to look at these products objectively. Ultimately, the question that I’ve had to answer for myself is:
Question:Do these products deliver what they promise?
The conclusion that I’ve come to is that generally they do not. Many of these products claim to “speed up” your computer by cleaning the registry. To me this claim makes no sense. Speeding up PCs is about optimization of resource utilization (hard disk, memory and processor). Simply running a registry cleaner is unlikely to have any noticeable performance impact when compared to other changes that can be made to a computer (e.g. uninstall unused programs or defragment the hard disk).
Finding empirical research to support the claims made by these products is nigh on impossible. Look for information online and you will almost always come across a page, article or review that has an obvious affiliate slant towards one product or another (i.e. promoting the one that pays most commission).
Could it be the case that, in many cases, these products simply don’t deliver what they promise? As a “Windows Professional”, I have some specific questions around the area of the suggested performance gains with registry cleaners. If so this opens up a whole other can of worms around the legalities of selling products that do not deliver what they promise. Has anyone complained of not seeing performance gains from registry cleaners? (interesting..)
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against promoting products or services through affiliate marketing. I’ve been making a living out of it for 5 years! The problem I have with these products on one of confidence in delivering what they promise in the sales blurb. With so little objective information around on registry cleaners, it leaves customers wide open to exploitation by false marketing claims (something I have always had a problem with).
It’s for these reasons that I’ve decided not to directly promote or market registry cleaners. I’ll do some further research on the claims made by these products and report back.
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