Attention: Program owners. Do you give a shit how you get your affiliate sales?
 

I know this is not new news but sometimes it takes having it happen to you before it really sinks in. I am sure this is happening to THOUSANDS if not millions of people.

I have a computer that has zango installed on it. I was clicking an affiliate link on one of my sites and when it connected with the sponsor, a pop under page came up as well from zango for the same site. Naturally their cookie, which was set seconds after mine was the newer one, so their cookie was on my pc and mine was errased. SO if i was to signup, they would get credit for the sale.

To the program owners, you still make the sale, so do you really care if some spy bot theif makes the sale or if the affiliate who actually sent the customer to your site makes the sale. Will you ban the spy bot affiliate if I send you screen shots, do you care ?

For those of you who don't know what I am taking about. Say you are on my site, www.mysite.com on my site i have a link to sponsor A, you click the link to go to sponsor A, my cookie is set on your computer. The spy bot will then detect that sponsor A's url is in your browser and it will launch a pop under window to sponsor A that sets their cookie. Since their cookie is newer it will over write yours.

Now my questions to affiliate site owners, do you think it is fair that these assholes come right behind our traffic and set their cookie 5 seconds later and they get credit for the sale. Will you do anything about it ?

I don't think most care until there's enough pressure to make changes.
WG

I know exactly what your on about, and your first paragraph was clearer than your first

they still get their sales, doubt they care... harsh reality

how is programs owners installing unix got to do with how they get sales.

no, the first was more clear, not the first. you got it all wrong.

They won't care until people drop sponsors....

Say theHun.net says, Fuck this shit and bans all galleries from Nasty Dollars (if they haven't already).... Then ND would finally take notice... But not until a huge old school TGP does it or a few do it together.

Ignore the problem and it will go away.

hunh ?



One way to fix this shit would be to make the cookie a perminate one for say 24 hours, then after that it can be over written. Or even 1 hour, anything to stop these assholes from poping up a window seconds after the surfer his the site through your affiliate code.

I am at the point, something needs to be done or i am going to be dropping affiliates. I don't even want to know how much money I am losing in sales to shit like this, and even worse how much assholes are making for doing nothing, but ripping everyone of us off.
Zango is just one of the spy bots that does this I am sure there is many more out there. And our best demographic of people, the new surfers who just got online, you know everyone of them has a PC loaded up with spy bots. It is amazing we still make sales.

affiliates need to do something about this.

Tis why I link all sponsors using php. Kills 99% of em, or used to anyhow.

Good question

The only spam I get on messenger (once a day in average) is from Camazon Cash so they must support spam if anybody wants to know.

I don't think they give a rats ass

would that be an offical press release from zango by any chance?

Yes this is complete bullshit . In last 10 minutes i clicked a link of to my site to cams.com boom fuckin popup overrides my cookie. I click a link on my site to wegcam boom wegcash site loads boom popup overwrites my cookie. I click a link on my site to ars boom few seconds later same thing a popup and my cookie gone


Yes i installed zango to see this now im pissed :mad:

the sad truth there is NOTHING one can do about it... :-/

Here's what you should do instead of bitching around:

In general, surfers don't like when their computer is infected with spyware. They usually don't like pop-ups or -unders. So they'll start googling for the problem.

Write articles explaining in detail how you can get rid of the problem. Submit them to directories, and assure a high rank in google. Put some adwords on it, too, to make some money of it.

And: tell other webmasters to do so, too.

bull shit, for one, If i ever find someone who is doing this i will take a baseball bat to them.

back to reality... sponsors can do a lot to prevent this.

1. They can delete these account when someone complains about it and redistribute the money they made into higher payouts. I will fucking hire someone to load up every spy bot other onto a pc and have then sit there all day and report these fuckers.

2. The sponsor can set a cookie that can not be over written for say 2 hours. So when they try to hijack my cookie seconds after it is set they can not. I won't lose the sale then.

3. They can check ips on all sales. When they get a sale, they check all ips and if it the same ip set another cookie to a different account with in a couple minutes or less of the one that got the sale, then they know it is bullshit and who to give credit of the sale to.

that is just a couple things off the top of my head and I know nothing about server side/ programming. I am sure somethign can be done to stop this.

1 or 2 hour cookies would just catch more heat here. If you send someone to ifriends and can't sell em but they click my link 20 minutes later and decide to buy you should not get credit.

that is better then nothing but that is not going to fix the problem. Seriously how many people that are new online are going to go to a search engine and try to find a fix to the problem that most of them doesn't even know what is causing it. For that matter some of these spy bots are next to impossible to get off your computer, even for people that know what they are doing.

I am not bitching around about this. I want to find out which sponsors will take this seriously. This needs to be stopped on the sponsor's end not hoping surfers search for ways to fix themselves.

Well, I think you'll have a hard time getting sponsors to react on this. Far too many sponsors fuck with their affiliates, anyway.

What are the chances of that happening ? Someone finds my site, clicks link on my site to ifriends. they don't sign up but with in minutes find your site and then clicks the link and signups through you. Hell set it to 5 minutes.

Happens quite a bit actually, crazy as it is.

The thing I don't understand is why wouldn't they fix this. The sales are being made regardless, it is who is getting credit for them that is messed up. So if they stop these people from doing this, they wont lose money, they will just be making sure they are paying it to the people who deserve it.

now this is how it will cost them money. If more and more spybots do this, and my paid ad sales are getting hijacked more and more often, and I start to lose money I will switch to someone else because I am losing money. (most of you will think you are being shaved) So now i promote another sponsor, and not only the spy bot assholes lose the sale but so does the sponsor since i switched to someone else.

So it can only hurt them by doing nothing. So why won't they fix this.

seriously how would you know unless you had spy bot software on their computer :winkwink: you have stats when they hit your website, but how would you know what sites they go to when they leave yours ?

Multiple accounts and being a stats whore.

i am going to look into the legalities of this and see if these sites can be sued. Seems like some type of fraud taking place.

A good analogy would be if a salesman who gets paid on commission helps a customer and when the customer goes to the register to pay for the item another sales man is standing next to the register and says " i helped that person" and they make the comission.

Definetly seems like some type of fraud. I will look into this.

I wonder how many/ if any assholes who use spybot software like this are on gfy.

More than one, and they are usually the program owners. :upsidedow

i guess we wont be hearing from them in this thread.


Please tell if you know who these people are. Talk about a way to ruin your affiliate program, get caught owning spy bots that steal money from affiliates....

It is bullshit and no they don't give a shit unless somehow it affects THEIR bottom line. That is why it is important not to rely soley on affiliate income but to have your own stuff running as well.

Good thread anyhow.

All these ideas require changes on the sponsor end, but like someone said before, sponsors don't really care... and even if you manage to get sponsor to shut down their account, the spyware owner will just create a new account the next day...

also, 2 and 3 won't work, not sure if you know, but spyware has complete control over the web browser, so they can simply prevent your cookie from getting set in the first place, and just send their cookie to the sponsor...

I wonder if p2pads is aware of this. I know at least bearshare forces you to download zango and run it on your pc, if you uninstall it, bearshare will not work. Not sure how many other p2p sites do this as well. Looks like zango over writes all the big sponsors cookies, so kinda hard for them to make money off of people using bearshare at least from those sponsors. :Oh crap

if nothing else i was serious about this:

As long as sponsors don't pay them when they get busted i will hire someone full time to install as many spybots as they can come across and sit there all day surfing, writing down affiliate codes from the pop ups that come up from the spy bots. If they don't make any money, they will go fuck with something else, mainstream perhaps. In the past they did stuff like if you went to a movie site, they would pop up a netflix page, etc.. shit like that, now they are straight up hijacking cookies. shit needs to stop one way or the other.

makes perfect sense.. they set the cookie to overwrite your cookie with THEIR affiliate code so in the end they have no one to pay. They make all the money. If that's the case I think that's theft and should be treated as such.

OOPS- been online too long :Oh crap

Ok now i am really sick:

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/180-affiliates/

200 million users use their software.

I wonder how much money each one of us has lost to these fucking thieves.

Publicly denunciate every sponsor who does not cooperate in this matter here on gfy.

I think i just found a better idea.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623374

The Collins law firm looks like they want to take down Zango, 1800 solutions, whatever their name is this week. But they went at it all wrong. They were trying to sue on behalf of the surfer, saying the software damage their pcs.

Now if they did a class action lawsuit on behalf of the affiliates who are getting screwed out of sales I think they would have a much easier case to prove. It is fact that every sale that company made was stolen from an affiliate, so every penny of that 19 million they made in 2003 was fraud IMO. No telling how much they have made each year since then.

So anyone here wants to be part of a class action lawsuit ? If this has merit I would like to persue it.

Like I said one way or another this shit needs to stop.

It should be no problem to sue those people.

lets do it.


LOL Warner Bros breaks deal with Zango.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072701620.html


seems Warner Bros. didn't like the porn that Zango was poping up, at least fucking us has cost them a few bucks.

wow never realized it was that big of a problem, they are hijacking clickcash aff links I take it will?

MoreNiche cares Woj. Any program who values their long term existence needs to care. There are a number of tools your sponsor can implement to spot Zango users internally - Im not saying here what we use, but we can spot them straight away. :winkwink:

But yes you are right, i have found these Zango users using our program - froze their account immediatly to find them popping up with a competitors site. :Oh crap

For this kind of situation programs can employ fair play services from peeps like Ben Edleman & co who can monitor the networks sites and keywords. They can even supply your program with video of the ad in action. Once a program is approached with this kind of evidence, they will act and remove the affiliate. Yes they may appear again, but eventually it will become unprofitable for them.

As affiliates what can you do ?

Well talk to your reps, find out what their official stance is.

Check the TOS of the sponsor - do they have adware use as a fundemental breach of the agreement? If they do not, they are not protecting your income.

Pressurise the sponsor to get educated on the subject and to implement tools for spotting both internal and external adware users.

If your pushing big numbers and can afford it, sign up to a monitoring service such as www.affiliatefairplay.com to monitor your sites and keywords

Educate your fellow affiliates, do not affiliate yourselves with sponsors who do not police this area.

Im seeing more and more Zango installation prompts - Its big business - and its not going away any time soon :mad: Any sponsor/affiliate

We here at PanchoDog care and would not accept that kind of "promotion". We are straight up and by the book.

Topbucks has measures to prevent this and will not/do not allow this type of promotion.

Unfortunately, there's not only one software doing this.

These types of practices have been discussed a few times during the past year and pro-active suggestions were made but it seems nobody caught on. Educate your surfer - make sure he knows how to clean it up and prevent it from being installed again.

If it seizes to be profitable for them and the lawsuits pack up - they will stop.

Here's a more detailed way to remove the software btw:
http://xona.com/2004/07/18-2.html

bump for an actual business thread.

Several people have pointed out that these things don't directly impact on sponsors enough to make most of them act. Similarly you might be able to interest surfers in terms of popups as such, but they couldn't care less who makes the money on a sale.

In other words, attempting to educate sponsors and surfers is fine, but will not provide more than a very partial solution. I don't have the technical know-how, but anything more comprehensive will have to be a direct solution which affiliates can apply for and by themselves.

I don't think educating the surfer is a realistic solution, sure it can help but no way it is going to fix the problem. These spy bots need to either become illegal or every sponsor needs to block them to make this go away, with the last one being the most effective solution. Thats like the anti porn people saying we want to fight porn, lets educate the people instead trying to make it illegal and getting rid of all the porn sites. For once we should take their example on something an aggressivly attack this shit. THIS AFFECTS EVERYONE OF YOU! I wouldn't be surprised if you are making 10 - 20% less in sales because of sites like this. If this one spybot can make MILLIONS, who do you think they are stealing it from.

So online gambing is now illegal, but online stealing is not.... :upsidedow



Nice to see some sponsors reply and that they have ways to detect this. I hope more step up and announce their stand on this publicy, so when I send them accounts to ban they will have to take action.

Prediction: Stealware & scumware will become more of an Industry issue this year.

Program owners who do PPC for there own sites are realizing they are losing full sales.

I'm surprised you are getting as much response here as you are. There are quite a few webbies here promoting Zango on their sites.

What about using sessions instead of cookies?

Yeah we care, and we avoid that whole possibility by not relying on cookies at all. We also have verbage in our TOS about trying to hijack someone elses code, and we enforce it. Section 10. a.
http://www.pimproll.com/terms.html
http://www.adultelite.com/terms.html