jayeff

If I knew a way, I would be happy to tell you. But frankly, it is your job to find a solution, always assuming you actually want one. I just don't buy this "we can't police our traffic" response which sponsors come up when issues such as this surface, not least because if the consequences of not policing your traffic were more immediate (as spamming via email became not long ago) you would find a way.

Secondly we are not talking about needing to monitor all affiliates or even very large numbers of affiliates, because in practise the only ones having a significant impact are those producing significant sales. Okay, it is remotely possible that someone might set up dozens of low-profile accounts, but that should get caught by some existing anti-fraud mechanism. I suppose you could have an affiliate diverting thousands of surfers but failing to convert them. But basically, you need only focus on your more productive affiliates.

So you hire a monkey to track back the traffic coming from what, 50-100 affiliates tops? Looking at the toplists of those sponsors who publish them, that is a pretty generous assessment for most sponsors and the job gets easier as time passes, because you will be able to whitelist affiliates who run "known" sites if their traffic gets a clean bill of health.

You don't need me or anyone else to map the whole process out: you know what is involved as much as anyone here. The point is that this is not the only reason you should not want anonymous individuals sending you large amounts of sales from unknown sources and it is simply not true that the task is either too big or too expensive to handle. It might not be possible to catch every offender, but that is no reason to make no effort at all...