HAHAHA Thanks Brujah!
Actually she just told me that she's been here to read this thread already. She also said that she was going to check a few links she found here. If she finds anything on those links, I'm sure you'll be contacted. And then she might even register and post to help clear up a lot of misunderstandings about spyware. If she does, she's definitely the one to go to for all sponsors who want to know more about this, as well as affiliates.
What a lot of people don't understand is that these spyware applications rarely come on their own. They are often bundled with other spyware programs. So you get one but in reality you get a dozen of them because they all piggyback on each other.
If you don't have a good spyware blocker and a good firewall, what the hell are you doing online every day? That's pretty much what I tell my visitors.
So they delete their cookies every day or every week. Oh well. I never counted on cookie sales since I started affiliate marketing in 1999. I'd rather lose a sale to the sponsor or merchant than to some scum affiliate who just steals from me.
Without affiliates to steal from, spyware would go nowhere. Hell, they probably wouldn't even exist. They don't have sites of their own, so the only thing they can do is steal from others or allow other affiliates to do it. Who in their right mind installs those things on purpose???
If sponsors advertise via ppc, you lose a ton of those sales to spyware if you allow it or don't know about it. If you rank well on SERPS, same thing. Spyware doesn't care how they end up on your site, it's your URL that is the target, not the affiliate site (although this happens too).
If an affiliate suddenly starts making a ton of sales out of nowhere, investigate.
If an affiliate is getting few hits but very high conversions, investigate.
If an affiliate is getting thousands of hits with no sales, investigate.
If many of your affiliates are telling you and complaining of their lack of sales or sudden drop in conversions, investigate.
I would much rather be contacted by a sponsor to ask me about my traffic and what I do to get such high conversions or such high amounts of traffic (without asking for all the details, of course) than the sponsor saying "good job Missie, WTG Missie, well done Missie" and doing nothing about it. That would tell me that the sponsor is on the ball and researching where the sales are coming from. It would give me much more confidence in that sponsor, because I KNOW that they're doing something.
No one is going to learn about spyware in one day or from one thread. But it's a good start. We have to keep this in the face of sponsors, make it known to the industry, and ASK that something be done about it.
I drop all sponsors that do nothing when told about a spyware problem.
What do you do?
Missie