Affiliate Network’s aversion to MLM

Multilevel Marketing (MLM) has a long and somewhat colorful history in Japan. There was a time that Amway could brag that 1% of the Japanese population was selling Amway products. And as in other countries, you have good MLM and naughty MLM companies offering to make you rich or skinny with little effort. My company, MetaFlo, is actively involved in lead acquisition for several MLM organizations. We utilize the media reach of various small web and mobile affiliate networks to drive traffic to our lead gathering sites and resell our leads to MLM distributors. We take extra care to ensure that all leads are qualified, opt-in and that our buyers are established and respected MLM firms. That being said, we still find our lead programs getting rejected by the larger affiliate networks. Why so? The most common reason is that the networks have a non-written rule of not accepting MLM merchants. There have been many stories of overly aggressive MLM sales tactics and some of the large networks (especially the publicly listed ones) prefer to limit their exposure to negative PR backlashes. Unlike online gambling which is illegal in Japan, MLM is perfectly legal yet their channels for online advertising is shrinking due to the general ban among the bigger networks. The situation could be viewed as an opportunity for niche affiliate network players to focus on the MLM category.