Originally Posted by Doctor of Credit

If Elliott really disagreed with it this much, why did he join BoardingArea when he knows that a lot of the bloggers engage in this practice? If I disagreed with something, I sure wouldn't be joining a collective of people that engage in that practice. Fixing the issue from the inside outside never works. Elliott is very good at generating controversy and pageviews and that's pretty much all this piece is about.

The Parallel to payday loans make little sense, the house always wins with payday loans with the way the fee structure is set out. Credit card rewards is a different proposition, as long as you can manage your credit responsibly you'll win. I agree that a lot of people aren't able to do that, due to a lack of financial education or other issues. I agree that bloggers should do more in trying to educate consumers when they regularly talk about financial products.

I'm not sure when we stopped taking personal responsibility for our own actions thought, but it's not a trend I'm fond of. It's regrettable that somebody got into manufactured spending and lost money, hopefully that person will learn in the future that they should fully understand a topic and the risks involved before diving in. I wouldn't buy a car that I planned to repair just because I read a few blogs on the topic first.

I have an issue with credit card affiliate links and that issue that for some bloggers affiliate links drive the content they produce, rather than vice versa. In a traditional media company you'll have the advertising and content departments completely separate, when people are running smaller operations this isn't possible. It leads to a lot of content that simply doesn't need to exist, but does exist to drive affiliate revenue.

I also have an issue with bloggers promoting inferior offers, equally worse is when they don't promote a certain offer whilst a non-affiliate offer is higher and then as soon as that offer disappears they'll start promoting their worse affiliate offer again.

I wish Elliott would focus on real issues that surround credit cards and credit card usage (e.g dynamic currency conversion, where the consumer is always a loser or secured credit card products that pray on those with bad credit and charge excessively high fees) rather than loyalty programs. He can be a good consumer advocate sometimes, I wish he would focus on that rather than trying to drive pageviews with this drivel.