The problem is not the tool, ppl can be honest or dishonest with it , like every tools.

The prob is HOW he try to sell it, like fuck your affiliates you dont need them. You can spy your affiliates traffic, and bypass them. You will know from where and how they convert their traffic.

FYI, that is my work truck.

Great idea Baddog, got a lot going on man. :)

I think Baddog backed off of that statement, but none the less, there are program managers/affilliate programs who could chose to use it that way. No affilliate program manager is going to go around a good affiliate and the bad affiliates arent worth going around.

Maybe this is how you should of announced your tracking software. FIGHT THE Chi** P**n Pushers who are using your site to make money and get away with it plus some added features unlike the first post.

I know I don't promote CP and I honor all TOS with sponsors. However, I do find it intrusive that a sponsor is/can track my moves to where I sending traffic. Funny that when I submit a gallery a bot scans everything submitted and says approved or not, but sponsors need a tool to weed out the bad and monitor the good people.

JMO, I would hire more people to weed out the bad and not rely on a script... From my understanding if a company knows and acts accordingly with independent contractor who is doing wrong, there are no fines or lawsuit issues. However playing dumb is another matter while accepting revnue and paying out...

Good luck and it is not fighting this or that, in this venture your are fighting to take rights away from honest people promoting porn.
:)

Bingo . . . .

Some affiliates manager already fuck affiliates and track adwords campaign from them and do the same. Was already posted there many times.

Like i said, its not a bad tool, its a great tool, but dont say NO ONE will use to fuck affiliates hehe

I think ill order the ifriends report myself, just to look a bit what they do :)

1) thanks for the marketing advice, but that's not how this product is positioned, it is a tool, and baddog showed one example, there are many examples

2) if a sponsor wants to spider you, they can do so and has nothing to do with t3report. If t3report spiders the adult web, and brings back collected data that is used by a paysite to do whatever they want with it, that's the Sponsors perogative, so you would have issues with them for using such tools.

3) You must not be a paysite owner then.. hiring more people means spending more money... it makes sense to use technology that is cheaper than hiring more people. You are incorrect about the liabilty as an independent contractor.. if an affiliate is promoting CP, then the federal government could come in with RICO to follow the money trail and take back money that was "ill gotten" from the paysite, so it is a real concern.

4) actually it's the opposite of your viewpoint, a paysite that uses analysis tools like t3report will weed out the bad apples. So if you are running an ethical business, you have nothing to fear, so your concerns seem more conspiracy theory then business reality.

Fight the Conspiracy Theories!

I agree but did you read your announcement? A competior who uses your services is not a Bingo. :upsidedow

With all due respect, you are not getting it. This tool was not built to track down purveyors of CP, it is there to show linking realtionships between sites.

There are literally dozens of uses. It was built for one thing, but as soon as Brandon (FTP) approached me about this, I started coming up with additional uses. Every time either of us talks to a potential client they give us another possible use, or they ask for an additional feature. Some were added immediately, some will be added in the future, and some were wishful thinking on the requestor's part.

The primary purpose for most will be to find out who has links to them that are not sending traffic.

Say you have a link to my AVS buried in some long ago forgotten TGP gallery. I get a report done, and I see you have a link to my AVS, but are not sending me any traffic. I can then approach you and find out what it will take to get you to start promoting me again.

I could also get a report on Cyber-Age. Find out who is linking to them. Usually I will find that the person linked to them is linking to several different AVS's. If I find out they are linking to everyone but me, I can approach them and maybe make them aware of my AVS.

50 T3Reports!


Fight the Finally i got the next page!

Does your spidering technology adhere to 'well behaved robot' protocols.

ie. Do you respect ROBOTS.TXT directives to ban your spider from sites not interested in being 'exposed' this way?

If so, what is your UserAgent ID to include in our ROBOTS.TXT to keep your spider out?

Or are we going to have to ban all your IP blocks?

-Dino

Now you are mixing apples and oranges. You are comparing what a program owner does with his own report , and what a competitor does with that same report.

nope.

and trying to block our web crawlers isn't quite the answer for many reasons:

1) there are many, many other web crawlers out there so you'd be spending alot of time tracking them all down and we spider from many different IPs

2) our spiders are throttled to download at 56K modem speeds so that we don't drain a website any faster than a normal dial-up.. and we only retrieve html, so the amount retrieved is relatively small and we don't hit your website continually, so we do play nice.

3) the t3report is based on linking relationships, so websites that link to your domain would still be accessed and have links that connect to you. being able to block our spiders could mean that the external links that you have that connect to the target domain of the t3report could be blocked, and thus, your domain never shows up in the report.. but other web crawlers that do access your site could be harvested to build up the missing links that end up connecting you into the report.


4) anyone can go to alexa or google and type in link:domain.com where domain.com is your domain and be able to pull up links to your domain, so you can't really hide.. if you have a website that people will visit, web crawlers will also find you, robots.txt or not.

5) by having your website in the report, it could actually gain business for you if people see you have good traffic leading to you.. why chase down each and every linker to you? easier to just tap into your traffic by buying ad space on your site, link exchange, or entice to be an affiliate manger.

6) if you are getting bad traffic and passing it on, then having that revealed could be bad for you, but bad traffic is bad traffic, there is no defense for that.. and again to point #4, anyone could look you up via alexa or google, the major difference is we have alot more data that we present then either one of them who cap the results at 1,000 and are not focused on the adult space.

Trying to block out our spiders goes again to my point of chopping off your nose to spite your face.


Fight the Repeated Actions!

Good luck on that one. Just an FYI, we don't need to spider your site to see if you are linked to someone else. Remember, it is T3, that is 3 levels. The spidered site, the sites that link to the spidered site, and the sites that link to them.

How do you think we found 90 million URLs? Manually input the data?

what a fish market, lol

Hey, if you need to change my post and put numbers in it to quote, so you can reply so be it. Good luck with your new venture and I hope that all the sponsors will buy your software/tool. You are right I do not have a paysite but some how I thought that was given in an early post on this thread.

Fight what? Later.

Changed your post? I believe he added numbers so you would be able to tell what comment/observation he was responding to.

The text of your post was not modified beyond that . . . . but thanks for the bump

Thought I was done with this thread. Read your original announcement. Here is what I got out of it: Pay site owners track your affiliate and your competition. Later in this thread it was said that this tool/software could track promoters of c/p.

Hey, if your tool could keep all the spam out of my email box cheers for you :)

Why am I suddenly reminded of Kirk's mysterious "Corbomite device"?

Lots of bluffing could start happening here with all this.... "Now I know where your traffic comes from..."

Any program worth a shit already knows where their traffic comes from, and keeps the good affiliates in and the bad ones out.

And even if you learn where my traffic comes from, it doesn't mean that my best affiliate is going to move to you for a few more bucks... I'm sure they already knew about your program already, and choose to send their traffic elsewhere, right?

Does it help my competitor to know where I get my traffic? How does he know where I get my PRODUCTIVE traffic?

Steve Lightspeed

well that's a quick summary of just 2 possible ways to use the report, i am sure there are 98 more... maybe if you had a t3report on one of your own domains or a competitor, you could find some good uses of the tool?

Send me email to brandon at fightthepatent.com or ICQ: 52741957 to give me a domain and i'll run a report for you, and then you could post up your thoughts once you have seen the t3report with data that is relevant to you.

Fight the Pepsi Challenge!

Well, thanks to Brandon I now have some idea as to the Corbomite device reference.

As stated numerous times, the T3Report has many uses. This report goes beyond the traffic you know about, but in fact will make you aware of other affiliates that are flying under the radar. You don't think that you have numerous affiliates that have links up, but are not sending any signups because of the placement of the links, or the fact that they are promoting tawneestone.com on an ebony TGP gallery?

If your affiliate manager is able to get a report on each of the sites in your program, he has an in depth look at the potential for more sales. Maybe clue an affiliate in to what he is doing wrong, so that instead of him bitching that he can't seem to convert, he will instead be singing your praises because someone from LS actually approached him and showed him what he was doing wrong, and now he is a top affiliate.

As far as affiliates moving away from you to another sponsor, most affiliates promote multiple programs, so if they are promoting a "young teen" niche, and some other company contacts them for the same niche, why wouldn't they put that site into rotation? Maybe your top affiliate won't, but how many thousand affiliates do you have?

You are right, no one is going to look at a T3Report and immediately be able to determine the source of your most productive traffic, however, by analyzing the number of links, types of keywords that they promote it should not be too difficult to figure out if they might be a good traffic source.

Do you read the posts or just respond? I have no use for your tool/service. I was just taking an stance of an affiliate that is honest. :)

See, that is where you are wrong. This tool is not just for program/paysite owners.

I am sure there is someone out there that you look up to, you wonder how it is he is able to get all those signups and big checks. Get a report on one of his sites, and learn the secret to his success.

Fight the Direct Deposit!

Well there you go. This is tool intended for covert information gathering by design.

Google gets to 'look up my skirt' because it gives me something back (not as much since last December, but we're working on that).

Altavista gets a peek, as does MSN and many other spiders which merit access to my sites.

Regardless of what your spidering is about, I will not be the only one blocking your access. Unless I order a report, there is absolutely no value in permitting and/or aiding you in the assembly of your 'interpretation' of my outbound links.

If anything, aiding you in your compilation of information about where I send my traffic will do much more potential harm than any possible good where my (site) interests are concerned.

If anyone who realized that, by permitting an agent such as yours, to collect outbound link info for purposes of publishing to sponsors who could (at their discretion) use that information to potentially impact their affiliate efforts in a negative way, banned your 'army of snoopbots' as an act of prudence, your reports will lose relevance and meaning at a binary rate of progression.

I ban most site scraping agents to cut costs on bandwith. If I believed that an agent was collecting info that could hit my bottom line, that agent would be banned with extreme prejudice.

If you're relying on the aggregate of other SE 'links:domain.com' for the accuracy of your report, well, good luck on convincing others that your report is comprehensive. Anyone checked Alexa or Google lately?

Tracking and documenting your 'footprint(s)' is a technical no brainer (even if you pretend to be IE through multiple proxies and tread softly on your tippiest of tippy toes) and over a short period of time, your agents WILL be registered with all their IPs in the respective Bad Agent registries.

You can use proxies, run from different servers or even desktop apps in basements and garages across the globe, but 'patterns are patterns'.

Correct. But if those other websites realize as do I that, unless I actually want the report it's best to block your 'agents', your chain of links is going to quickly scatter apart.

It's not about hiding - it's about understanding what, after all your independant agents have been blocked by paraoid site owners who may trust you but not those you furnish their info to, value does your report have if it is just an aggregate of Google and Alexa and AllTheWeb and whatever other free public reporting systems already exist.

Those whom I link to already know my value - it's called affiliate stats (and sales).

Those who link to me, and more importantly send traffic are known as well through a thing called 'web logs'. In fact, the actual traffic a site sends me (available free in my web logs) is more important than any (promising) links they may have to me.

Do we get spanked too?

I'm not underestimating the challenges of nailing malicious bots and spiders. They can be a royal pain in the butt and sometimes the best way to deal with them is by dealing with the company which is doing the unwelcomed attacking. I don't know about your site TOS, but mine expressly prohibits bad agents and sometimes technology is not the only remedy for annoying pests.

Leave my nose alone - I like it!

It tells me when something smells 'off' and right now something smells fishy about this 'tool' (I did wash my hands before typing this).

But hey, what do I know?

-Dino

oh, you don't trade links/traffic with other sites? You must have only SE traffic, or type-in traffic... like immaculate conception of traffic, it just arrives at your webpages??


If you are promoting a sponsor that is in a niche, i would think that you would to like to tap into traffic that has keywords that attract surfers, such that hopefully they find you and your affiliate link and signup.

So by knowing who has the traffic you want, you could do traffic/link exchanges, buy banner spots, etc...

To think that just because you are an affiliate, that you can't use the t3report is very short-sighted, and probably based on the fact that you either don't get the t3report or didn't even bother to go to the website to view a sample report.

So your "stance" is that you object to sponsors who would be "spying" on their affiliates? Sounds like your issues are misdirected and more appropriately applied to sponsors. So to apply another proverb, you would "bite the hand that feeds you" by taking an objectionable stance to a sponsor should they subscribe to a t3report???


Fight the Proverbs!

You have not been reading my posts nor the website and you contradict yourself.

We do our own spidering.. you know that because you just talked about blocking us.

You mentioned that people could do the equivalent of a t3report by using alexa or google.. i responded to say yes you can, but the data is not so good, and only limited to 1,000 results... so we DON'T rely on search engines.


I understand your points in being a "paranoid" webmaster.. and i am sure you cross out your credit card number on the merchant receipt at restaurants, you flush out your cookie cache each day, you have your phone number unlisted, and you try to keep yourself away from government snooping databases.....

If you feel that this collected data will be harmful to you, then you have every right to try and block access. So you see more of the abstractness of the "evil" of this report, rather than the realistic uses of the report for maximizing a websites linking relationships...

so we can agree to disagree and you won't be a customer of a report.

Should you change your mind someday and see the value, then i welcome the opportunity to provide you with excellent service.


Fight the Spiders!

I presume that is a rhetorical question, however, I must thank you as you have definitely given me a ton to work with.

I can pay less than 200 hundred dollars and get stats on anyone I look up to? Wow, what a deal :)

I'm sorry. Then I misunderstood. I thought you were suggesting that even if all your spiders were blocked your report still included the SE reports. I was pointing out that if your spiders were blocked, then your reports would only be the (inferior as you suggest) SE reports. But if you don't rely on SEs as you say, then once your spiders are blocked, your report will empty?

The fact that you claim your spider will try to work around anyone using industry standard protocols for managing User Agents casts a shadow over the integrity/intention of your tool. If you're going to cheat and hack, it's hard to see this as a wonderful aid.

If you really believed and could demonstrate the benefits of your 'tool' you would not be afraid to let others choose to let your spider visit.

That's just the beginning. I don't care what information you claim to collect and why - your approach (visa vi using 'bad agents') starts in bad faith and it only gets worse from there.

I recommend that anyone not ordering this 'report' be sure to block any agents associated with this 'tool'.

-Dino

You are not paying attention. It would be $250 if you get a report on a site other than your own. However, I am afraid that you either don't get it, or have convinced yourself that there is no way that this report can help you. So be it.

The offer Brandon made is on the table, should you change your mind and decide that just maybe there might be something out there you don't know, and you want to see what it is, contact him od me and we will hook you up. :)

You're welcome. Will you fix my phone now?

:)

-Dino

I would love to. My rates are $60/hr, and because of the distance I will have to charge travel time, . . . . round trip.

I guess we might as well close up shop

It must freak you out to know that credit card processors do their spidering to ensure use of "bad and banned" words aren't being used on your websites.

It must freak you out to know that VISA has their own set of spiders that do similar things.

It must freak you out that the government does both online and offline wire tapping, and even though Carnivore has been somewhat scrapped, they are now using commercially available software. So the governement can grab their own copy of wget, httrack, heretix and do their own spidering.

I do appreciate the intellectual debate, and you have certainly brought up some interesting points.

Your recommendations to not buy our report is laugh-out-loud based upon your abstract conspiracy viewpoint, that you don't want people to know what you are doing. It's all public information, get over it and get used to it. There are many other lurking webspiders and crawlers out there. More nefarious things are out there like spyware, adware, tool bars, nasty IE exploits.

The T3Report is a very valuable business tool that gives business owners insight into their traffic and to know where the traffic is at. Fortunately, many large and small programs see the value, so your "not recommending" of our product will be countered by our success.


Fight the Playa Hate!

How can such a positive tool like T3report be made into be a bad/threatening tool in this thread? Good grief.

baddog - is this the new stuff you said you were going to release very soon?

Ok...way to much to read in this thread, can we start over and you break it down a little....I have seen this report and I see where this could be quite useful.

As an affiliate manager, I see the stats and wonder, if this webmaster has "more" traffic especially when they are convering under 1:100 with us. It amazes me to see trickle traffic when they are closign 1:49...either they are not paying attention to their conversions with us, or thats all the traffic they have but it makes me wonder if they have more and where is it coming from.

Can T3 help me there?

(first of all, congrats on your move to xbangcash.com as the affiliate manager!!!)

I'll break it down like this: If you ordered a report on your website LateNightHookups.com, it would show you the affliliates that we have found. You can get this same information from your weblogs in checking your referrers, so no big deal so far.

In looking at your affiliate stats, you already know who the top affiliates are based on payouts.

What you may not have known is that some of your affiliates that are sending you trickle traffic, could potentially be sending you more traffic.

The T3report will then show you where each of your affiliates (first level connections) are sending their traffic (ie. external links to other programs other than to LateNightHookups.com) as well as showing where they get their traffic from.

The report allows you to drill down and you can see all of the domains and URLs that send traffic to affiliates.

Using this information, you can do some qualitative analysis to see that with lots of links leading to them, they could have alot of potential traffic. Looking at where they are sending their traffic shows they are promoting other programs and niches. You could then contact that affiliate and entice them to promote you more.

Before t3report, you would dismiss affiliate webmasters that had low traffic counts and only focus on the ones that had higher ones. What you may not have reliazed until now, is those affiliates could have goldmines of traffic, they just aren't promoting you as much.

Another way to use the t3report, is order a report on whoever is a competitor to your niche website. Look at their affiliates, and look at where the affiliates get their traffic so you can figure out who you want to contact first. Contact the affiliate webmaster and suggest that if they are promoting that niche, why not promote another website in the same niche?

Makes sense to an affiliate webmaster if they are promoting in a niche, and have traffic that comes to them for that niche, to promote other programs that might convert better for them.



Fight the HookUps!

Wow. Your right.

If I have an affiliate who is not pushing much, it makes it difficult to contact them and discuss it with them. Maybe that is all they have, maybe they are not pushing much but I think in these times Webmasters push ALOT of sponsors...and you would think if they KNOW they are converting under 1:50, they would turn more traffic on to that affiliate site.

The other benefit I see useful to me is more of a tool so I can assist the webmasters in getting better conversions.

If I can see where their traffic is coming from I can make suggestions on the best XBang sites to promote.

I had a few webmasters I sent an email to suggesting they push specific sites, they changed their links, and their signups were x4 higher.

So I am the type of affiliate manager where I am always looking to help webmasters who are not converting well, sometimes it is because they are still learning the art of matching their traffic to the best genre site.

I would be interested in the T3 report more so to help webmasters make more sales...and I do not think that is invading anything...