Media Partners Read On!

As part of Unruly's ongoing effort to maintain the highest standards of accountability and transparency in social video advertising, we mailed all our media partners today in order to clarify our requirements for disclosure.

In case anyone missed or overlooked the email, here's the text:

Dear Unruly Partner,

Please read this email carefully because you need to make sure that you’re religiously following Unruly's guidelines and terms of service.

http://www.unrulymedia.com/publisher-terms/

At Unruly, we’re really proud of the amazing sites, blogs, apps and games we work with, whether it’s a mini-media empire like Mashable, fantastic niche titles and communities like Skiddmark and BuzzFeed, or more personal but awesome blogs such as The Green Familia and jasonslater.co.uk.

When we’re distributing great content from brands we need to make sure that this is done in a way that is completely transparent, honest, and ethical. This is not about enforcing minimums, it’s about being as transparent, honest, and ethical as possible. About being whiter than white.

First, let’s talk about links. Unruly’s video player typically links to the advertiser’s site, YouTube channel or Facebook page. It does this in a totally safe way (using nofollow, redirects, and JavaScript embedding) that does not transfer PageRank from your site to the advertiser’s site.

This is really important. Be very, very careful if you add any of your own links. If you want to link to the advertiser’s site in an article, post, or tweet, only use the redirect links that we provide you that are also safe. If you don’t do this, you may be in breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (Google guidelines). If you’re not sure, just don’t link. The video player links so you don’t have to!

Second, let’s talk about disclosure. Unruly’s video player always has a disclosure underneath it making it totally clear that the video is sponsored. This is fine if you just embed the video in a column or area reserved for commercial content. However, if you embed the video in a blog post, you should always put the phrase ‘Sponsored Video’ as the first two words of the title of your post. If you link to a page containing the video in a tweet or status update, you should mark it #ad. It doesn’t matter that you’re not being paid to tweet or post the video - Because you stand to benefit commercially every time someone watches the video on your site or app, you need to make sure you disclose this clearly.

We have been working over the past few days to strengthen our internal audit methods and processes. We hope this is helpful. Think of us as a second pair of eyes, helping you stay true to your readers and to your principles!

As a consequence, some of you may start to receive notices from us over the next few months if our audit procedures discover something that needs to be brought to your attention.  We hope you will review these notices and make any changes that are necessary.

We’re really proud at Unruly to be working with such a great family of bloggers, app developers, film makers, website owners and game developers. We’ll do everything we can to improve our service, to bring you more videos, to earn you more money, and to ensure that, together, we hold ourselves to the highest standards.

Best Regards,


Steve Dorey

Media Director