2 Disturbing trends I have noticed
 

The last 6 months I have noticed less and less surfers coming to my sites with refering domains. I have heard that most new pcs are shipped with some sort of Norton software that hides refering domains. Anyone heard of this?

I have also noticed that more and more paysites are buying traffic from me that do not have affilaite programs at all. In the past many paysites bought from me to try out new tour pages as they could get very accurate results on each one as my traffic is consistant month after month. But in the last 6 months I have many paysites who buy on a regular basis. It seems that many new paysites do not want affiliate programs. Maybe it is because all the affiliate fraud?

No, I think it's just smart business. Affiliate programs exist to access traffic you can't likely get otherwise. You keep more money if you can get the traffic yourself.

Matt

It's increasing but the traffic without referrer is only a few % (at my sites). It's done by the Norton Firewall. It shows somethink like this as referrer:
XXXX:++++ (blocked by privacy protection software)

Regarding the referrer not being passed on, it makes sense from a privacy point of view. It'd be a bit annoying if you're a stats junky and trying to figure out where your traffic is coming from. It'll really make a lot of business models really unsafe. Not knowing where your customers come from wouldn't be a good thing.

Matt

good post, i seen a couple of them as refferal url's.. had no clue wtf it was.

Well if this is bundled with all new pcs running windows, lots of coders are going to have to re work their scripts. Think about the affect this has on trading traffic.

Your selling to paysites again? Please give details, I loved your traffic.

I, too, would be interested if you're selling to paysites.

Choker, I need a few minutes of your time if you dont mind. Hit me up on icq whenever you get a few....thanks

303634866

Norton has fucked up my computers twice and now they are fucking with my referers? Damn bastards...:321GFY

It has nothing to do with affiliate fraud. A lot of webmasters who open paysites realize they can make more long term from self promotion as oposed to handing over banners and content to inexperienced webmasters who dilute their marketing.

If all traffic trading scripts would allow you to send traffic using

http://www.yourdomain.com?mydomain.com that would help a lot.

I have never had any problems with Norton. its that macafee crap that always kills me.


As for the traffic thing. I am using chokers traffic on my tgp.

www.adultswebsites.com


and we also bought some for one of our pay sites that is not part of our aff program. We had had most of the traffic paid out, and the conversion was crappy. Sorry to say that choker..


BUT the traffic for the general TGP has done great. the click throughs are great..


Not to worry choker, we will be making some changes and getting more traffic soon.

In my tracking script they show up as:

blockedReferrer
Hidden-Referrer

I also get a few "null" and "undefined" but I think that's something else.

That would help the cheaters a lot :2 cents:

Not at all. You can spoof a referrer just as easy.

This is the wave of the future really.. I expect we'll see more of this as all those firewall programs just copy each other feature-wise.

As for buying traffic.. it makes sense when you find a good source to buy all you can. You have decent traffic Choker. Most traffic brokers are shit though...

NP at all man. One of the reasons I "publicly" do not sell to paysites is because you need certain types of tour pages to do good with this traffic. The typical paysite tour page is not good for my traffic. IE I send some unsold traffic to Nasty Dollars sites. When I count the sales versus traffic sent, I am making over $3 per k, not bad for unsold traffic that I need to get rid of. Now if I owned paysites like Nasty Dollars has I would say I would be making $6 per k for the traffic. So for paysites like thiers with NEW UPDATED tours on a weekly basis my traffic does very good on. Maybe not worth it for a affilaite but for the owener yes.

The only details for this for guys that are asking is just a clean site, no consoles or tricks. I don't require free samples but it is highly recomended. Again I judge the Nasty Dollars tours as the sort of paysites that work very well with my traffic.

Wut? Are you crazy? So you think we all fraud?

Where the hell did he say that? Are you implying that NO affiliates cheat?

Fucking A man great. I knew you used to do this and I was converting at fantastic rates. I am so stoked that your taking on some more sites like this.

So whom do we contact, anyone is specific or shall we just hit you up?

The Industry is changing. wait till you see what happens...

I agree, it will become more professional, of course it will still have partying; all industries have parties. :)

Matt

Just submit your site as a free site. After it is approved just make a payment. After I approve the payment you can add traffic to it and set a force.

hmmm, when I input your icq number and do a search, nothing happens

I also noticed lots of +++++ referers, but that kind of privacy is bullshit in my opinion.I guess that's the only thing norton is able to do because their anti virus software is crap³.

Why should paysite owners pay 50-80% to their affiliates if they can get the same revenue for less money?

i've been saying that for some time, probably posted on your board. if a computer has norton internet security installed browser doesn't pass full headers to the server, mainly it hashes the server refer string. i'm sure many other firewall will folow this trend. instead of relying completly on your access logs you should assign your trades a unique id and track your traffic by that id.

when you tell your trades to send traffic to
http://www.yourdomain.com/
tell them to send to something like
http://www.yourdomain.com/?id=trade_id
add few lines of code to store clicks coming from that id.

i have most of my traffic coming from SEs and about 25% have no refs, i know this because i don't do trades on that domain, typing highly unexpected too, and i also run norton internet security, so i've played with logs turnin NIS on and off.

to summirize above, if your surfer runs notron internet secirity firewall you cannot track where he came from by looking at your server access logs :warning

Keeping more money in ones pocket seems to be the way to go.