Zango gone bust!!!

Zango was unfairly charged with affiliate commission stealing. This is a complicated story, and I'll forgive anyone who doesn't want to read through the gory details. Back in 2004-2005, Commission Junction and LinkShare were two of Zango's largest advertisers, and we were one of their largest publishers. We displayed targeted ads promoting their advertisers' products, took a share of the proceeds when a user bought something, and pretty much everybody was happy. Initially, we sometimes used the advertiser's home page as a targeting mechanism, and I'll have to confess, this never struck me as particularly fair to the advertiser. (If the user is already sitting on eBay's site, why should we get a commission if the user happens to make their purchase through our ad rather than their original browser instance?) There are some instances when home page targeting is justified: if Alaska doesn't want Southwest's ad to show up when someone visits their website, they should pay for the privilege. (You'll note whose ad shows up when you google "Dell", and that doesn't happen for free.) But most of the time, I think the advertisers who complained about it had a reasonable point. However, as soon as LinkShare and CJ asked us to stop this practice, we did so. We even implemented a number of fairly complicated and expensive features to ensure that we wouldn't inadvertently display ads that would violate their terms of service. (In fact, Ben Edelman once badly misinterpreted a packet sniff to imply that we were being particularly nefarious, when what it actually showed was us trying desperately not to step on somebody's home page, and going through some admittedly strange gyrations to refrain from doing so.)

But here's the frustrating part. Imagine the following scenario. A user with Zango's software visits a CJ publisher who is promoting some eBay products. That publisher sets a cookie on the user's machine that says, in effect, "If this user buys something from eBay, I get the commission." But then, before the user visits the eBay site, but after the first cookie was set, Zango happens to pop an ad that sets a different cookie, this one claiming the eBay commission for Zango. Given this scenario, I'm perfectly willing to grant that Zango should not get the commission, and the original publisher should.

So the question is: how do you make sure that the first publisher gets it, and Zango doesn't? For a variety of reasons, this was a difficult scenario to prevent from Zango's side. (Among other things, how are we to know that the site in question belongs to a CJ affiliate?) This is a very simple problem to prevent, however, if you are Commission Junction or LinkShare. Your script should just place different cookies for each publisher, and you should give the commission to the owner of the cookie with the earliest timestamp rather than the latest. But for reasons that I don't understand, neither CJ nor LinkShare would agree to make this simple change: and eventually, under pressure from their other publishers, they stopped doing business with us altogether, to nobody's benefit.

I should note that this is made a little more complicated by the fact that some of the folks who advertised through Zango did in fact engage in nefarious cookie stuffing and commission stealing. The way that Zango's advertising system worked, an advertiser could make the link they insert do pretty much anything allowed by the browser sandbox. And some of our advertisers did engage in commission stealing. It was never possible to catch every instance of this, but we did our darned best, and implemented a number of processes, systems and features to catch folks who were trying to do so. In the end, the extent of such third-party advertiser fraud was minimal.

There's been a lot written about Zango "cookie stuffing", but I should say very clearly: Zango does not stuff cookies, has no interest in stealing somebody else's commission, and did everything it could to prevent this from happening. Yes, Zango did display targeted ads, and would have liked to display ads from affiliate networks: but those ads introduced an ambiguity into the process which the affiliate networks refused to resolve. The net result was that Zango was shut out from what once had been, and should have remained, a mutually beneficial and profitable advertising channel.