Ben Edelman, assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and spyware researcher, has published updates to his work.
Nearly three years ago, Ben explained how software from Zango (then called 180solutions) could rip off merchants by claiming commission on organic traffic.
When users simply type in a site’s address and make a purchase, merchants shouldn’t have to pay an affiliate commission. But Zango’s software monitors what web sites users visit, and when it sees users browse a targeted merchant, Zango often pops open an affiliate link to that merchant. If a user then makes a purchase, the merchant pays the affiliate a commission — even though the affiliate did nothing whatsoever to facilitate or encourage the sale.
Ben’s article, Spyware Still Cheating Merchants and Legitimate Affiliates, explains how some of the largest advertisers continue to be targeted, and three resulting harms: wasting merchants’ money, reducing commissions paid to legitimate affiliates, and helping to support spyware vendors and their partners.
Ben also announced the Automatic Spyware Advertising Tester, which he has been using to find bad affiliates.
In addition to sleuthing out the dirty affiliates, the “AutoTester” can also detect other misdeeds, such as click fraud and cookie-stuffing.
Visit http://www.benedelman.org/ for more details on Ben’s research.
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Unfortunately this is just the nature of the internet, I don’t think it will ever stop, there will always be some form of badware software running around that will try and rip off the merchant.
It seems like a never ending battle, the affiliate networks will ban and figure out how to detect the software/fraudulent clicks and then the people cracking the system will find a new and better way to rip it off.
This works both ways. The massive adult dating site, AdultFriendFinder, took a whole lot of heat for running Zango campaigns. Affiliates found that their visitors were being directed commission-less to AFF’s site. I would suspect they aren’t the only affiliate program on the merchant side doing this (to their credit they stopped, but they claim it had nothing to do with affiliate’s complaints.)
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