So i've installed Zango. What is so bad about zango?
 

I've heard for the past few months how zango is costing us sales and business. So I decided to install it on an old computer of mine. I've been surfing around for the last 20 minutes and besides a few (not many at all) pop ups i can't see anything that is wrong. I've check affiliate ids, click thru galleries everything without a problem.

I need spyware 101 here guys. What is zango doing that is truly hurting our business? I'm trying to see how zango is costing me business but I can't find a single thing. What am i missing?

dating, webcam companies bid on sites like jays-xxx-links video-post etc, large sites and if they have zango installed thats when the affil linking would change

Don't know about now, but in the past, it would pop competitors ads over people's sites. For example, an AFF popup would open over iFriends.

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Read that then please reply :)

Thanks. Just saw that with fling. I got popped for 18oncam when i went to it.

I might install it and see what all it's doing too. Hopefully it's not hard to get rid of it :)

i can purchase keywords for twitys for example and if user has zango i can have em sent to what i want overlapping your site and so on

Read it. but like i said besides dating/live cams etc i don't see any examples of it costing us much business.

Thanks Juice. I figured that was how it worked. But every big paysite i've checked isn't being cheated in any way.

Yup. So basically anyone of your direct competitors can buy YOUR domains and pop there site instead.

How would you feel if you found out thehun was buying thumbzilla.com and poping his site over yours? Bookmarker comes to your site but a competitors site pops up over you and confuses the surfer. (Note, thehun was just a made up example)

It's one thing for Zango to sell ads by keyword like "porn". It's a totally different story when you can directly buy urls IMHO.

What the worst type of example is imagine one of your affiliates of twistys buying one of your paysite urls and re-poping that same site but with HIS affiliate id. Thus stealing the sale from the original traffic sender including TYPE-INS!

Zango advertising is perfectly legal...but a complete example of the difference in morals among businesses. Some find zango completely OK. Others find it sickening.

there were some screenshots and such posted in refe to dating/cam sites , tbh i never looked to deep into Zango and how it works but the principle is like what i wrote i think heheh

take like a keyword u are with for twisys and bid on that word and then youll prob get the zango ad popping up over your site...

ya know what i mean :pimp

I understand that 100%. That is exactly what i thought i would see happening. I know potentially zango could be used for that. The thing is i haven't seen one example of that. That is what has me baffled. I can't find a single example of that happening. So while it could be happening it's not. Unless i'm doing something wrong.

They are not being cheated and are lucky, BUT if we start to accept it and say it's not soo bad the flood gates open and then we are all fucked.

Sexbankroll who runs 18oncam is a rather large sponsor and people all work with them, they are straight stealing from Fling, that is not cool. Dating, Cams, Paysite etc. WE all work together, run ads together, traffic and ads on the same sites etc. Lines need to be drawn and followed.

If not you set yourself up for something a lot worse.

****Shap side note what ever happened with your friend that went missing?***

I'm not sure how much it's happening right now. But there was a large dating/cam company that was doing this for a while. They were biding on there own domain and taking the sales inhouse. It's what started this whole issue.

Again..no idea how much it's happening right now.

that's actually nice to know - i would have thought by now that scumbags would have bought keywords through Zango's traffic program for well known paysites like Twistys, Bangbus etc and popped up similar sites over them. You say that's not happening when you surf with Zango installed.

Shap you using ff or ie?

If you want to install spyware to try out - use a program called parallels - you can create windows install which "lives" in a little file in your computer, and you use it as a little window inside your regular OS. Or just fire up an old computer you don't need for anything...

Ftv, Karups, score, bang, all the biggies. I'm not getting anything besides the site. On a few i get a pop up for trafficyield or some other shit (ie ccbill i get a pop up to other credit card companies). But for paysites I'm not seeing anything. I'm actually really surprised.

ie. i figured that is what i should be using

It may also be dependent on your location. Are you surfing from the US or a geo IP outside the US?

I agree 100% with you. It's not cool and many other spyware programs are not playing nice. That i'm pretty damn certain of. I was just expecting zango to be much worse than it is.

btw nothing. Police never went public but to us (his friends) admitted they believed 100% without a doubt he was murdered.

How much do they really convert ?

i have no doubt the dating stuff is still bad. I've just been researching freesites and paysites

good point. canadian ip

Shap, your in Canada, right? You may not be seeing everything. Geo stuff.

Plus, I think that many programs (or their affiliates) tried the system out and found that they weren't making enough money with it. The cost per click is pretty darn high.

yeah works best with ie. I got a zango account when this all went down. I don't see anyone biding on your urls.........

that makes sense. I know there are some people trying to steal affiliate ids. If they aren't doing it with zango how are they doing it? and how are they making it wide spread?

Very sorry to hear :(











Adult should have a zero tolerance when it comes to this shit honestly. If a program is shaving, or redirecting traffic it's outed and no one is fucking touching them, but when they use a third party to do it it's fine.

I assure you that if twisty's, lightspeed, naughty america or someone else insert program name was using it's own coding to redirect it's own affiliates traffic elsewhere and they were losing the chance at a join they would be outed and lose a considerable amount of traffic.

BUT, someone like sexbankroll can do it all day long using zango and everyone still does biz with them.. WHY is this??


Also Shap, you have a lot A LOT of traffic, why not put something on your site to see the amount of surfers that actually have it installed.

I'm a total spyware newbie. Here is what I've gathered.

- zango has the potential to be really bad and steal alot of traffic from all of us.
- dating sites (especially the lowlifes SexBankRoll) are buying and effectively stealing traffic from sites like Fling.com. A true demonstration of how powerful and destructive zango could be.
- most tgps aren't losing traffic to zango
- most paysites aren't losing traffic to zango
- most affiliates don't seem to be losing signups to zango

I may be wrong but that's what i've witnessed so far. My feeling is that zango has the power to be a huge issue but as of right now is not a major problem for tgps and paysites. My guess is when it comes to spyware there are some other nasty programs (maybe midsize) that are doing so much more damage and are flying under the radar and not being discovered.

Thanks.

Btw my webmaster put something up a while ago to redirect zango people to a page with a msg. I actually asked him yesterday to get a counter up so we can track how widespread it is. Once i have results i'll post them.

I agree sexbankroll are pieces of shit. I don't and won't ever do business with them.

I agree we should have zero tolerance. I guess my post wasn't about how to deal with zango offenders but more a post updating clueless people like myself who keep hearing zango is costing me sales. Should we tolerate zango and offenders? HELL NO. Is zango causing a drop in my sales and traffic? That is what i wanted to find out and i can't see any proof of that right now.

Shap i ran a test on hoes.com when this all went down. It did a total of like 6k of popup in 4 hours. So i can just do the math on a 24 hour period. Cost me $92 to figure this out. So yes its alot worse then people think. Last numbers i see there were like 32 million cpus that zango was installed on. Not to mention it was on youtube for a while and a big thing on myspace as well...

I've installed it before to test it out back when AFF was advertising with them. And it was AFF that was pop'd about 90% of the time. They were buying ads, not for just keywords but also on all the big free and paysite domains. They were even popping ads on their own site to try get steal affiliate traffic.

AFF stopped when it was no longer profitable for them. Luckily(sort of) for us I think a lot of people found it hard to make money with zango and adult. The adult advertisments seemed to have dropped off quite a bit, but there's still some companies that never quit and obviously found a way to make it work.

From my logs about 2-3% of my total traffic is infected by zango, may not sound like much to some. But for one adware company to have that much is just crazy.

worst part about Zango was the potential for General Acceptance in our industry. they were at shows, talking to program owners, taking people out, without fully explaining the process.

if they got a foothold here, it would change the game, even if 5% of traffic was stolen, that adds up for all the webmasters and affiliates, but doesn't add to the join pool

just depletes it more by taking the joins away from the hard working and giving them to the quick buck keyword bidders.

if they would have gotten acceptance on a large scale, other companies would be in here too, then we'd prolly get to a point where 20% of intended traffic was being redirected to keyword buyers.

I am curious why almost a year later did you decide to look into this now?


18oncam.com are big whores with zango, they target more than a few sites, including ifriends.


18oncam.com btw is owned by SexBankRoll.

oh ok, so if it just affects " dating and cams" it doesn't cost *us* much money. Are you sure you didn't mean cost *you* much money. You definetly aren't speaking on my behalf when you say "us".

All sites can be targeted, which ones are and are not at this exact moment in time, I would have to down load zango again and see. But anyone right now can target your sites and cost you at least 2% of your traffic and sales, probably a lot more now.

you are looking at the issue backwards.

go to zango

create an account to buy clicks

for keywords - enter the URL's of all of your sites

THEN.... once they are approved, you will see how many people are bidding on your site URL's ... which means everytime someone visits YOURSITE.COM on a computer with zango installed, it pops windows over your sites.


thats ONE way you are getting screwed.

that doesn't take into account bidding on keywords like "twistys" or whatever and how ads are triggered on other pages of people TRYING to send you traffic because those keywords are shown on the page, in links, text etc.

thinking it doesn't affect you or TGP's or paysites is silly. Read Marc's post to get an idea of how much traffic you are losing everyday.

wow... a little behind aren't ya...

The big question and I would think not very well.

The adult net is a business not a social club, it has few rules and the ones we do have few apply them unless forced to. So if it worked people would be using it. But how much does it work?

You go to a site as a browser looking for the product that aroused your interest or as a free surfer looking for anything you don't have to pay for. You land on a site and a pop up arrives telling you about something else. How good is that for the buyer?

If you were walking into a store and someone thrust a notice in front of you telling you about another store would that please you or piss you off?

Did we spend 6 months ranting and raving about something that did not work?

Did AFF take it down because it worked and they love us or it did not work?

not another zango thread

Must have bore directly into his brain.

I don't think Zango is as much of a threat as the trojan codecs... they are everywhere...

Zango is also trojan codec.And i think all sites losing income beacuse of zango surfers beacuse i am very sure surfer wont buy anything if he will constantly bombared with popups.When i got popup,i blacklist that site in it.

Zango is advertising heavily on web2.0 sites like ifilm and veoh.. they are only going to get installed on more and more machines.. I dont use affiliate progs so i dont really care but it is pretty sad that just to get some advertising revenue these web 2.0 sites take that money...

Because unfortunately i'm too busy running my company :disgust

Yeah i am. I'm ahead on other things so it probably evens itself out. I'm sure the other program owners are in the same boat as i am. I'm busy making money for my affiliates and providing a kick ass site for my members. Unfortunately i haven't had time to look into this. I'm not ashamed to say that because I know i'm not alone.

I have noticed a DRAMATIC increase in the number of big sites like the video ones mentioned above as well as celebrity gossip and torrent sites pushing zango installs in the last few months so that 2% will be up to 5% or whatever soon enough.

I agree with the guy who said earlier though that the video codec site problem especially pushed thru' the current massive .cn .edu .gov Google spam is affecting us much more than zango

http://www.just-my-two-cents.onthisproblem.cn :)

Ozman the codec guys are fighting hard because in the long run they are facng a losing battle: Apparently thier shit don't work on Vista, or at least the infection process is very, very much harder and the update process almost impossible. They know they maybe only have another year before Vista becomes the (sadly) dominant OS, so they are trying hard to get to as many people as possible before their run out ways to get their stuff out.

They are agressive. Recently, they moved to installing EGNIX proxy servers on infected PCs, routing the traffic from their spams through the infected systems. If more ISPs paid a little attention, that problem would go away - they shouldn't allow webservers and should actively block income page requests.

Does anyone know if avnads is still allowing zango ads? That really pissed me off and I havent used them since.

get ready: the sky's gonna fall!