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Originally Posted by Gaybucks
I'm one of the co-owners of Gaybucks.com, which runs several twink and fetish sites and uses NATS for affiliate tracking.
We fortunately have not found any evidence of this sort of behavior yet, but some of the things that we would look for (and do keep an eye for) would be
-- unusual traffic/join patterns (large number of joins coming from different places that don't fit the statistical pattern of other affiliates with a similar amount of traffic)
-- Atypical conversion rates
-- Affiliates that can't answer questions about where they are marketing our program
A good program manager is always keeping his or her eye out for potential fraud. Unfortunately, it's a fact of life in this business. This is one more "pain in the ass", but I'm sure that if some sharp programmers with a statistical background spent any time with this, it would not be difficult to write a small script to analyze the NATS logs and identify the affiliates that are sending (stealing) this sort of traffic.
Of course, the sponsor has to *care* about its affiliates in order to go through the effort of doing that.
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Excellent answer, and I will be hitting you up on Monday to discuss a few things if that is ok with you (business wise).
For the nosey people (LOL) you seem to have a good business accumen, which unfortunately in this day in age is far & few between and very rare (let alone in this industry).
However you wrote, and I quote:
Quote:
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unusual traffic/join patterns (large number of joins coming from different places that don't fit the statistical pattern of other affiliates with a similar amount of traffic)
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Who is to say that isn't a PPC campaign set to run only during certain time frames because statistically those are the best join times for Brand X's niche from my many years of tinkering?
Many spyware joins are legitimate class "A" customers with valid credit cards and lube in hand. Carded joins will always get nabbed (most of the time, if you are on your toes) but this spyware shit has just generated an easy stream of traffic for those that are shady enough to install it, and/or pay for it's advertising programs.
The day an age of Ivan Kutch-a-kokoff writing his own trojan, popping up a series of FPAs or galleries from his $19.95 cellar dwelling, hogh school kid maintained server, in order to grab our sales are gone. These guys are smart mother fuckers, and now it has become popup, PPC, pay per pop big business. Like I said (not sure if it was in this thread or another along the same lines), but these ass munch's are fucking genious and anyone here that say otherwise is only lying to themselves.
There is a reason that Ferrari driving fellas such as Lars, Sagi and the lot of them used them. It may have been a bad PR move because they were caught and I honestly do not think that they understood completely the ramifications of their actions (may that have understoood the technique of trafic generation from Zango or not), but this shit is large. When I say large, I mean HUGE!
I happen to own a small chain of PC repair shops here in the tri-county area, and I deal with this every fucking day. Granted I have become a Zango expert, but between Zango and the supposed Spyware scanners (Spy Sheriff, etc) that auto install and tell you that you MUST buy their product to disinfect your PC, well lets just say I have plenty of food on the table for the family. It's a catch-22. As much as I hate them for doing what they do, they keep me busy during the day and make me quite a bit of money all the while attempting to eradicating them.
I have several customers that pay me to reformat their computers MONTHLY because they can't stay away from the porno.
