10 MILLION, that's not a fair asking price for your sig on gfy.

Seriously... Money on the table. For how much would you sale your gfy reputation for1 little month?

Larry logged off?
I think Sergey is on invisible dude

While I understand and appreciate your position, what you're doing with this post is essentially attempting to justify stealing from your own affiliates.

Is it not possible that Lars bought traffic from a source without knowing exactly where the traffic is coming from? And now that he's shut it off he can't stop this from happening?

It seems like Zango and companies alike are basically for program/site owners to compete with each other. They create the battlefied and surfers/affiliates get killed in the war.

thanks for the post lars....

If that was the case, why wouldn't he have said so? The wording of his post suggests that not only was he well aware of the source, he hasn't discontinued using the source.

His post boils down to "We buy traffic from adware companies so that our competitors don't. We're aware that a side effect of these traffic buys is that we end up stealing sales from our affiliates. We're looking into solutions for this."

They can shut it off any time they want

http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/4130/backendxm7.jpg

One interesting thing in this thread is the cookie talk.

if webmasters really want to see their sales drop- they can use programs that do not hardcode their links. be careful what you wish for- revolving methods around cookies is a smokescreen. keep a year or lifetime cookie- whatever, sales still are not going to track accurately because cookies are good for a lot of things- but not for core affiliate tracking.

Tracking anything via cookies is so 1995. Why not use sessions or URL tracking rather then cookies and be done with this whole mess?

Umm thats what we do URL tracking

It appears that Will76's biggest point of all this is about cookie tracking and no one is using cookies alone to track sales. Will76 has some learing to do and his intelligence is very questionable because of his false accusations. In another thread someone posted webpower being promoting as a URL in Zango. Will76... When will that affiliate URL be banned? It appears to still be active and debunking EVERYTHING your opinionating about.

great description of gfy boys :1orglaugh

Funny you are the only one saying this stuff. Where are my accusations false ?

cookies being over written is just part of the problem. So what if I am using session tracking and my visitor clicks a link on my site to Ifriends signup page. Let's say they are using session tracking, well the person on zango has purchased the keyword ifriends.com so as soon as my page comes up the person buying that keyword pops up his signup page with his session tracking in it over mine. Who makes the sale ? so this problem is not just with cookies.

Cookies are easier to mess with because they could overwrite your cookies without popping up a page if they wanted to. For session tracking all they have to do is pop up their page over yours and it servers the same purpose. Most of the surfers will not even know that it wasn;t you causing that page to come up, they will think that is the one they clicked to see in the first place. The popup comes up real fast.

I don't know who's fake nick you are but it is obvious you are a fake nick, or one of those " buddies" that kept telling DH to post retarded comments here. Keep up your hate, all you are doing is keep giving me an oppertunity to make you look stupid with your post.:thumbsup

If you see clickcash affiliates doing this report them, they will be banned.

"Adware is software that is installed on a user?s computer with notice and consent by the user"

who do you thing you are fooling with that?

Where's the SexSearch thread? Have they responded?

until we see legislation, there's no easy or obvious solution..

imo there's a bandaid fix which requires profiling how affiliate sales are generated... the problem is piggyback referral info that supercedes the original referrer.. as the merchant you have the ability to identify this behaviour... the hard part is determining proportions (ie, legitimate elapse time for same referral, etc.).. for that i suggest you take the CRA\IRS's approach: go for the obvious big fish..

while not an ideal solution.. there will be some that slip through the cracks, not to mention another added operating expense... but never forget that respect and goodwill go a long way..

good luck.

can't you get camsdotcom trademarked or something so no assholes can bid on it?

It's like a shark feeding-frenzy, with the affiliate's referral-link acting as the rubby dubby.

Clearly, ethical affiliates and sponsors are on a hiding to nothing.

You are NOT being forced into supporting and using adware? You are CHOOSING to do it on your own free will. This is sickening to hear. Basically you are a slimey greedy pig and your actions are hrting the entire adult community in so many ways it's unreal.:2 cents:

elasticatedman
Registered User


Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: UK
Posts: 1

:winkwink:

so, ahhhhh, what are you trying to say??:Oh crap

That is a very disingenuous comment. There are solutions just as there are choices and while Smokey's intent is admirable, that type of "solution" is on a par with advising stagecoach travellers to wear bulletproof vests.

In situations like this, there are always three options. You can go along, making the problem worse and becoming part of it. You can sit back and do nothing. You can fight the problem.

Which may sound like crusading idealism, but you run one of the largest operations in this industry which therefore suffers more than most, the consequences of working in a "wild west" environment. Think about the resources you have to put into protecting your business: those are real costs which will increase year on year if you don't act.

That realisation takes a decade or two to dawn on every new industry. But they all get there and one reason is that scammers are people with very limited horizons who simply do not belong in big business. So long as you play their game instead of your own, you are limiting yourself to their petty ambitions.

I'm speaking from experience. I started my first business with less than $5,000, working out of a two-room basement. It was built largely on a scam, like every other business of that sort at the time. It made good money. Then after a couple of years I realized that was as good as it was going to get, but that if I ran the business legitimately, there was a potentially huge market for it. So I cleaned up my own act, hired new people and trained them. Three years later, sales were into 7 figures and it was one of the biggest companies in its field.

There is no way to describe just how trivial and stupid the games that I was playing in the early 1970's seem now. I sold out in 1980. In 2004, the last year the company operated as an independent division, sales were $450 million. Now it is part of Deutsche Post who have an annual turnover of more than $70 billion. I shake my head every time I think about the early days.

Your operation has the muscle and influence to change the face of this industry and it is in your own interest to do so. If you choose to offer only fluff in response to the current issue, you may well lose only a few affiliates, easily covered by writing some more checks to Zango or whoever. But wouldn't it make more sense to begin turning situations like this to your advantage? Take the high ground and condemn scumware. Use the obvious opposition to it to beat your less ethical competitors around the head. You will gain affiliates, they will lose affiliates and you will have moved the industry a small step closer to where you need it to be.

Our business should be selling to the public: not preying on each other. That's a practical consideration, not an ethical one. There are millions of surfers out there and only a few thousand webmasters. Which market has the most potential?

Affiliate does all the WORK?!?!?! holeeee shit i cant believe what i just read and had to comment on that.....

you must be new to this game...

It took balls to explain that you use it and why you use it, kudos for that.

If you ever consider litigation regarding other competitors using your trademarked terms to place contextual ads in adware systems, have your legal team look at the recent case: Tiffanys vs. Ebay, exact same issue for them but in this case via adwords/adsense.

Exactly - get your legal team onto it, there's no need to be supporting adware and fucking over affiliates.

"While it is perfectly legal for us to place ads with internet software providers like adware companies, specialized browser providers, and search engines that place our ads near our affiliates ads (for example this happens often with keyword buys on search engines) this notion of the adware ad ?collisions? that has recently been raised does make us feel somewhat uncomfortable ? in other words we find ourselves sympathetic with those who have not been happy with this bizarre result."

HAHAHAHAHA.......

Cant wait for the day you guys get sued for all the shit you are doing in this industry :)

milk it milk it....

So let's put it this way.

If shaving was the only way you could be conpetitive and offering theses high payouts would you do it ?

You follow Wall Street at lot it seems. Just look at what Warren Buffet said last week about "wrong" businsess practices over his empire ?

If you think you're gaining an edge on long term business by over writing your affiliate's cookies then good for you.

As far as I know, nothing personal but I wouldn't use a program that use such practices.

It's a business decision like you are saying, nothing personal.

I could force myself to be paid an $5 extra a signup to promote programs that have cross sales and signup... Wich with the low marging ad campaings we are running would tremendously improve our profit and our business plan...

This would be the easiest choice and the easy money.

I can understand your situation is much more complicated but your site is almost labeled as a virus in norton and such. This is gonna hurt your biz on long term.

But speaking about that, we are killing this business by offering so much free content, so I also am in one of theses situations where I don't have the choice...

So I guess bottom line what we need to do is have a bigger organisation (gov etc) telling us what to do...

great post by jayeff there

I think he meant "does all the work [generating the traffic] and in most cases provide 95%+ of the sales / revenue that the company makes."

without affiliates MANY companies would no long exist. So it is not wise to shit on them when they are needed.

Lars .. i realise you prob have some top notch lawyers , but i think their feeding you some lines here..

It most certainly is illegal it just hasnt been prosecuted much.

I dont think the excuse of " everyone else is doing it so if we didnt our competition would " is a valid excuse

Its time to say no to zango.. hang up the adware hat.. aff isnt successfull because of adware , they are succesfull because of YOUR AFFILIATES.. remeber that.... and rememeber that it aff fails wont be zango that causes aff to fail , it will be affiliates

Can we please stop using the word "adware" in relation to Zango and other operations like it!

ICQ is adware. Eudora is adware. Adware is a legitimate marketing model in which part of display is occupied by advertising no more pernicious than what we might place ourselves on one of our sites. No-one who has acceptable adware programs on his or her PC is going to attempt to visit a site, only to have another pop up on top of it.

You are playing right into Zango's hands by equating their product to legitimate adware and if you are doing it to spare Lars' feelings, the obvious question is why? It took him a week to respond at all and he did so with evasions and euphemisms. There is nothing reassuring in anything he wrote: quite the contrary. He hasn't been in this business 5 minutes, so if he has been surprized by anything at all, it is that he got caught and at least some webmasters have spoken up against him. His message is basically the same as it is about working with stolen content sites: if we didn't do it, someone else would. Oh and btw we are going to keep on doing it...

excellent post:thumbsup

Whether it's legal or not isn't really the point. AFF affiliates are not happy about this. Do the right thing and stop spending your money with Zango and any Zango-like software that comes along in the future. Also, make it clear that ANY affiliate sending traffic via Zango and similar software will be terminated immediately. That's the only way for you to come out of this smelling like a rose (in the eyes of your thousands of affiliates that know about this anyway).

Your traffic sources are really making you look bad. Between the adware, content thieves and illegal software (warez) sites that pimp AFF, you have a serious problem on your hands. I sent an email back on the 5th of Oct. about several warez sites promoting aff and the sites are still flying aff ads and their accounts are still active. I sent the email to abuse, legal and to sagi and nothing has been done about it.

This is exactly the point that a number of people have been furiously tap-dancing around..... LEGAL does not always mean ETHICAL or RIGHT. For some people, ethics are simply not part of their personal equation.

nevermind ...

Lots of hating in this thread still - but I still dont see anything constructive.

If this issue really is that important to you put your thinking caps on and try to answer the question I asked above....

So far we have -

1. Take the Smokey approach and try to code your way out of it - dosnt really solve Lar's problem though.

2. Take legal action.

Any more?

I know its alien to most on this board, but lets try to be constructive rather than destructive for once. :2 cents:

I think its good that you've come forward and admited what your doing, but the fact that you are still going to continue to do this is worrying to put it lightly.