jayeff

I think your perspective is irrelevant because it is too logical.

A site must have both the reality (to keep existing affiliates) and perception (to attract new ones) of being a money earner. How exactly both those ends are achieved is neither here nor there, and the lifetime of cookies is just one of the options for creating the right mix.

The bottom line is that no individual affiliate knows for sure whether cookies - long or short term - are actually a good thing overall. It seems reasonable that we should pick up sales on a second or third visit to a sponsor's site. But we neither know the precise value of that possibility, nor can we estimate what we lose by handling traffic which is already "cookied up".

That said, enough webmasters are sold on the value of long(ish)-term cookies, that someone who does not offer them had better have something other shiny object to dangle in their place. And I suspect that overall, sponsors do very well from them.

A heck of a lot of webmasters are entirely focused on traffic generation and clicks, paying very little attention to traffic management. Admittedly most are too dumb or lazy to change, but without cookies to provide at least the illusion of income possibilities beyond the immediate, surely more would seek to control their traffic for longer. Because of the income smarter sponsors make from traffic which does not buy from the site to which it was directed, the last thing they want to do, is something which might make affiliates think harder about the point at which they pass traffic along.