Cali Lewis Shame on You

I’m going to warn you now, this is going to be a long meandering rant, but it is vaguely wordpress related.

So today I was working on setting up my new office, and one thing I’m doing is putting up pictures i’ve taken of web celebrities that I saw speak. So far I have Leo Laporte (saw him at Macworld 2009), Matt Mullenweg and Timothy Ferriss (saw them at Wordcamp SF 2009). Then I started thinking, it sucks that I don’t have a picture of Cali Lewis (geekbrief.tv) since I’ve seen her speak twice.

So I got to watching some episodes of Geekbrief.TV that I have had sitting in iTunes for a while. I watched episode 620, and at around 2 minutes she starts talking about a wordpress plugin. Now the plugin sounds interesting, and it’s called Pretty Link. It’s basically a link redirector, kind of like tinyurl or bit.ly, but for your own wordpress site. Now I started wondering why she didn’t mention my favorite redirection plugin (simply called ‘redirection’) or any of the other 200 redirection plugins you can get from the wordpress plugin directory.

Then came the bombshell. It’s a $97 plugin (well, actually there is a free version available too but she never mentioned that). I won’t go into a rant about how wordpress is open source and how wrong I think it is to charge for plugins (or themes for that matter) especially if they do the same thing as freely available plugins – that’s just opinion, and if Cali thinks that paid plugins are a good thing that’s hers. My problem is this: at 2:05 she shows a link: geekbrief.tv/prettylink which uses the prettylink plugin to redirect (and cloak the link) from her web site to the purchase page for the prettylink plugin.

So here’s the problem. This is clearly not a commercial, Cali makes it clear she is telling us about “one of the coolest plugins I have ever found” and gives a short review of it. But the link she gives is an Affiliate link. If people go to the link I mentioned above, somebody (presumably Cali) gets a paid $. Now I have no problem with affiliate links in general, in fact I use them in my podcast, but I make it VERY clear that if you click on the link and purchase something, I get paid!

Cali Lewis took a blatant ad for Prettylink Pro and disguised it as an unbiased review (watch the episode). One can only wonder how many people purchased the plugin, strictly because of the trust she has built with her viewers. I guess she’s cashing in some of that trust…

If you want a free alternative to Pretty Link Pro, first search the Wordpress Plugin Directory for redirect, there are many excellent plugins. I’ve also asked for alternatives on Mahalo Answers, and funded it with $10 out of my own pocket. Be sure to check out the answers.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.