Affiliates SUs not credited due to Shady practices by KAZAA and others.
 

Hi ya all, I'm new to the board but been a lurker for a long time.

Anyhow here is something interesting that I've found on the ARS board posted by one of the webmasters.

" This is from NY Times"
When you install Kazaa, Morpheus, or 20 or so other programs, they also install an affiliate code swapping program. It runs in the background, and when a URL request is made to the Internet, it checks if the URL's site has an affiliate program, and if so, swaps in its own referral code in place of the existing one. Tiger Direct and Amazon are mentioned in the article, although I'd be amazed if they weren't doing the same with porn sites. Has anyone heard of this being done in the porn biz?

Amazon's terms and conditions forbid the practice, and so they drop the accounts when they spot them. Tiger Direct cut them off just out of principal. But presumably they can change referral codes on the fly, so it's just a cat-and-mouse game, and in any case they're not going to restore the commissions to the original referrers. To further complicate things, the affiliate-swapping program isn't deleted when you remove the original program that installed it."


New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions
If you want to read the complete article then use arslogin for login and password or create your own.


If this is true than no wonder some of us see decline in sales while the sponsors don't notice anything, basically they get their sales one way or another, just the middleman (affiliates referral code) changes. I hope most reputable sponsors don't allow this practice and will terminate such accounts, but there is always others that won't care who gets the credit as long as they get the sales.

Let's not turn this into a sponsor bashing thread please, I'm not sure if any of the adult sponsors are aware of this and if they are taking any steps to prevent such dishonest practices or if they just dont care.



Any thoughts?

i wondered how long it'd be before someone figured out they could do that with software thats used for other purposes.

Not suprised at all. Gator does the same thing

This is getting ridiculous.... getting screwed in every direction.

Its been done before, and happens more often than you think...but if you think about it...what's the difference? You still get the same site, the same service, etc.

If you could do it, you would. We all sit here talking about, "Nothing's Free...there's always a catch." Like freehosts for example...well p2p isn't any different...

This has nothing to do with p2p trading, read the article first before posting.
Basically your referral codes on the customers PC is being changed to theirs (KAZAA?s and others like it), so you don?t get a credit for sales generated from your sites/links. It?s like selling a product in a commission driven store and someone else getting the credit for it. This may not be a huge problem yet but if it continues, it will be a different story few months or a year from now.

I disagree...

This doens't involve p2p????


When you install the software that allows you to trade free shit with others (Kazaa, Morpheus) that's peer to peer bud...when that software includes a proggy that adds a referral code onto any url that has an affiliate program...I'd say it involves p2p.

Sure it involves p2p because it is embedded and distributed with it, but it is not limited to such a program. There is plenty others that are not p2p and do follow such a practice. I though you originally meant that this was only a p2p porn/warez trading thing and not an affiliate code switching program. Anyhow, when some thought that the p2p was getting bad for trading porn/warez, it just became worse.

no shit..
thats why i use Kazaa Lite.. comes with all the searching features without the spyware, code swapping, bandwidth leaching or ads for that matter.

like woah.

Dude, this has no affect on the users. It's fucking US!

I hear you loud and clear, DUDE, The only reason I correlate it P2P is because p2p's proliferation...I've seen this type of tactic mixed with free public proxies promoted to "Kill Pop-Ups" which is double trouble...

I understand who is getting the shit end of the stick here...

Although, I'm curious as too how far they actually go...do you think they can risk the futher complications that would arise if the gov't. realized they were peddling porn as well as facilitating the mass infringment on inumerable copyright laws?