It's always entertaining to watch how this 'industry' goes around in futile circles without even noticing.
No doubt it's a major (albeit inevitable) bummer that technically saavy brave bastards are siphoning off sales with far less effort than those providing the traffic being jacked.
But, many of those (affiliates) who are currently impacted are the very same ones who have a million and one instant rationalizations for throwing surfers in circle jerk popup hells ('cleverly' engineered even to bypass SP2) and some even spam.
So first you create an environment where dumb surfers will beg for any add-on tool (often disguised as a super duper popup blocker) which also happens to undermine your own traffic - brilliant.
Once again, the brute force (technically strong like bull, business smart like streetcar) brings you back to the same place you started - only a bit more frustrated and tired (although some have now moved to nicer climates).
At some point, it would be nice to see some mainstream biz attitudes (finally) adopted, like treating your (potential) customers with respect - rather than forcing them into your endless popups because, in your mind, it's your bandwidth *they* are 'exploiting'.
This issue with affiliate traffic jacking will sort itself out over a long and painful period.
Sponsors on the ball, will demonstrate a higher level of biz attititude and establish a new level of security (including in-house cross-refs, inter-affiliate fraud detection) and then educate affiliates on how their system works and try to earn their trust. This may require trusted third party auditing of sponsor data to ensure no shaving, bonding of sponsor staff, and flagging/investigating suspicious sales (as earlier posts have suggested, the actual logic to do this is trivial).
Sponsors who get busted looking the other way will lose the affiliates which were actually generating the traffic the jackers were sending, so the jackers will have less to send and the sponsors may finally realize that the quality of sponsor/affiliate relationship is as important as the aggregate sales. Sponsors who sleep through this will find their sales drop exponentially - more quickly that individual jacked affiliate sales have dropped.
Some affiliates may even shift back to managing their own membership sites - just like in the good old days and old sponsors will depreciate to paysite owners having to find their own traffic - now competing with affiliates turned paysite owners. Not to underestimate the costs and difficulties of producing a member converting/retaining paysite, but frankly, when you line up the main sponsors today, most look the same in terms of what they offer.
This industry does not seem to demonstrate much forward thinking as an industry. Everyone is out for themselves and cashing in while the getting is good. If you get your share before the cycle bottoms, good on you. But it will bottom (already has in many ways) and then version n+1 will emerge.
The distilled issue here and now seems to be affiliates asking sponsors (and hosts) to not treat them they way the affiliates have been treating their surfers. If/when you find your way out of this loop, only then can you expect anything different.
