Merchants Limiting Their Blog Exposure?

I was surprised when I heard about this at first but a major credit card company has announced that their affiliates are now not allowed to put links inside their blog posts. I do not have the liberty to discuss which company has mentioned this new rule, but the fact is, if you are a credit card blogger, you are pretty much not allowed to provide a link to credit card X even if you are reviewing the card X.

I understand that the financial industry is highly regulated. But what I don’t understand is why merchants shoot themselves in the foot by penalizing their best bloggers. Do I think blogging is the best way to run an affiliate marketing business? Not really! But there are decent bloggers out there who attract decent traffic to their websites. And these guys who are in authority position can actually sell anything on their blog, so to ask them not to put affiliate links inside blog posts is just baffling. I guess the industry is becoming even more regulated…