Quote:
Originally Posted by 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...
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I agree with you. All the sponors (and people who defend AFF) were jumping on me for asking why they weren't being proactive with the copyright problems they are facing with potterybarn. I got the same replies, who do you expect us to do, police all of our affiliates ? Well I am not even a programmer but I suggested why not once a week take a list of all of the urls that sent you traffic, run some type of spider on those pages and read meta tags. Set up a list of copyrighted words to check for. When you register for a copyright they actually write it down on a list ( who would have thunk it) and they actually let people see this list, they dont keep it at the pentegon locked up (wouldnt that defeat the purpose of having a list if no one knew who was on it ?
Naturally some idiots said well you can't think of all words in the word that are copyrighted, well maybe not, so does that mean you don't try, either 100% or nothing ??? stupid argument. At the very least in the eye of the court if you took measures to stop something it will go a long way vs. you did nothing to prevent it.
Anyway, I believe in most cases if sponsors thought about it they would find ways to be proactive in these situations. I believe that most sponsors do not want to do this. DO you think AFF would have banned an affiliate who was sending in 500 signups a week because he had potterybarn teens in their meta tags ?
A lot of these company don't care where their traffic comes from muchless would they take steps to prove that they knew what was going on. They prefer the see no evil, hear no evil, then there must be no evil happening method.... then you get a wake up call from potterybarn