Harvard assistant professor Ben Edelman, known in the affiliate marketing world for his previous research projects on affiliate parasites, thinks it’s time for a bill of rights for online advertisers. Ben offers the following explanation and five rights to protect advertisers from increasingly powerful ad networks.

Affiliates and merchants that buy ads from Google and other ad networks should read this.

Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers

Online advertising presents remarkable efficiencies—better targeting, improved measurement, and greater return on investment…

Yet there are challenges, particularly when networks of intermediaries place ads through convoluted relationships, and all the more so when advertising powerhouses dictate unsavory terms. The result is a troubling mess of ads gone wrong—advertisers charged in ways they didn’t fairly agree to, and on terms they didn’t meaningfully accept. These problems threaten to destabilize online advertising—wasting advertisers’ budgets, slowing transition to online formats, and reducing payments to online publishers.

Ben proposes 5 specific rights advertisers should demand as they buy online placements. More…

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