Programs scamming affiliates out of commission via warning pages
 

Some programs do it for ages and more and more seem to jump on this train.

But first of all, this is how it works:

1. Surfer comes to my site

2. He looks at galleries with branded content, maybe downloads a few pics or clips.

3. He clicks to the sponsor, cookie with my ID is set for X hours or days. Joe Surfer looks at the tour...and decides to leave for now, wanks off to something on his harddrive.

4. Joe becomes horny again, looks at the clips he downloaded, sees the URL and types it in.

5. Now it becomes interesting. He'll come to a warning page, which is totally fine since he just entered the domain name. The warning page should link to the tour, it does, but with an inhouse code of the sponsor. The surfer clicks, watches at the tour again, joins...and you get ZERO, because the last cookie set right when he entered from the warning page is the inhouse one.

I know the justification: We want the sites to be crawled by google with our own codes, so the searchengine traffic isn't credited to affiliates who push the URLs with their IDs in the SERPs.

For me, it's basically bad business. I don't need a 365 day cookie, but it's not asked too much to leave the cookie with my ID untouched if a surfer was originally referred to the site by me and comes back a few hours or even minutes later and joins.

Discuss...I don't want to point to anyone specific, but if needed I can show proof.

Yea.... there are a lot of programs out there playing a lot of games to try and shaft affilates. It would be easier to list the few who dont.

All I can say is that if someone made a resource site which reported all these things about every sponsor including cookie length, overwriting of cookies via warning pages, etc they'd end up like Jimmy Hoffa within a month. And the police would have a few thousand suspects.... :1orglaugh

As an affiliate you have to test this stuff yourself and not trust others blindly.

Well, i dont. That is a bit on the creative side i would say. Apart from the extra money here and now, i cant see why it should be a great idear to try and give your affiliates a bad ratio as this would be a part of.

A bad ratio and risk they will stop promoting. Now, i have NO idear what % of surfers that this would happen with. But dosent seem like a good idear to me.
Just my :2 cents:

Depends on how long ONE want to keep running. It's very easy to switch affiliates for publishers.

Good point. But thinking long term i think it`s a bad move. both plain biz and moral wise

duplicated post

What's wrong with GFY today, sometimes it shows up 2 same posts (dups), but sometimes it doesn't show a post at all :(

Out of curiosity I just checked a Reality Cash site just by typing in the url and noticed that on the enter link on the warning page it had my ref code in it. So it's safe to say that if a surfer comes back in that way and he clicked a link on my gallery before the cookie will not get overwritten with an in-house one.