Quote:
Originally posted by foe
for stats to do that it means 100% of people on the net jsut got infected with a trojan in a week, right.... shaving on the other hand makes a lot more sense
|
Hmmm, not really. Another way to do it would be to hide the skim code in a gallery, submit the gallery to the top TGPs, link lists, etc etc. User checks out the page, does not buy, then moves on to other pages. If at some later point they decide to click on and buy via ARS link, the traffic is tracked to the honest webmaster but the sponsor code is swapped at the transaction/submit transmission phase.
Besides, even if we assume that your shaving theory is true, why would ARS be stupid enough to shave off 1/2 to ALL of some of their top affiliates' sales? Wouldn't you think if they used a razor that they would shave uniformly across their whole affiliate database so that no one gets socked with a heavy Sign Up decrease?
Skimming on the other hand, does not care what webmasters' prior conversion rate, it only depends on the pages the users go to. Naturally, the top webmasters get listed in the top TGPs more so they get skimmed more.
There's 2 ways to combat this skimming problem, assuming it exists:
1) ARS plugs the security leak -- does an audit, etc.
2) submit only to lesser known but higher traffic sites. I doubt this is much of an option since there are massive autosubmitters out there that submit to 80000000+ sites, etc.