it's ruthless and nasty they knew what sites and domains they had in the works long before any affiliate knew. either reg every domain u want then or simply never let any webmaster reg a domain with any of your site name in it from the beginning. that's the only fair and just way. I wish more people had the balls to stand up against em and say get your lawyers and show that they did nothing for years and now suddenly they send out an email saying hand em over.. I think a fair judge would see the shadiness in this.

im still surprised they dont have anyone for in-house SEO, it probably hurts money-wise when you manage to rank 1st position in google for their websites ;-)

I wasn't saying THIS is a piracy issue. I was saying that NOW that piracy has done all this damage...many companies for the first time ever had to bring in their lawyers to begin trying to understand the DMCA laws.

Trust me, this was never much concern in the old days.

We mostly all had lawyers to fight the govt. I certainly didn't understand the importance of trademark and what it will mean when all of this piracy is finally laid to rest by new laws that will catch up with technology.

That's all I'm saying. We now all have lawyers telling us to actively protect trademarked domains. That was never the case before. In the past we only were concerned with staying out of jail. lol

I hope that makes more sense. I can't speak for NA or ND. I'm only giving you an educated guess based on what I've been instructed to do by attorneys about my trademarks and what the importance of a properly maintained trademark is going to mean in the future in the battle against piracy.

I wasn't meaning to infer that current affiliates who are domain squatting were responsible for anything like that at all. And I sympathize with their plight. But as I said, it's business. I'm just glad I always built my own sites (tgps) and never promoted using that method.

I will take a total guess here but would imagine having thousands of webmasters covering the top rankings and paying them a commission is cheaper,faster and more cost effective overall....hence thats why the affiliate model grew so big as it did or programs would have simply done everything inhouse.

There was nothing in their affiliate T&C's when I signed up to their program in 2002 that said I couldn't register domains containing their site names, every smart affiliate knew the value of that back in the day. It's still important to this day of course on some search engines.

It seems unjust that they are now retroactively trying to impose this new ruling. If they want some of my "choice" domains now, I'll ask for some reasonable compensation, or they can send me some legal documents and I'll take down links to their sites from every site I have them on, stop promoting them, and urge everyone else to do the same.

Program owners should remember the value of affiliates, without us, your brands may never have taken off, you may have only made a tenth of your total sales. To fuck us over is a daft business practice.

:2 cents: there was nothing in tos when i signed up. now, after weeks of hard seo work and stable serps, they want took my hard work and all my possitions and my knowhow? thank you for all the nice money you made me, nastydollars, but this is a big hard fuck off to your hard working affiliates

It sure sucks ass doing something for over 3 years, buying domains, building sites, links, traffic, etc then all of the sudden they pull the plug on you. Sure would have been a lot cooler if they just said no more site names in domains from this day forward...

same here too...

I am sorry about this issue,

so thats why I am always developing the generic domain names to avoid this situations.

Sucks big time

they must be hurting for money.
I received a dozen spam emails about their newly launched gfrevenge

uh yeah....go after affiliates....forget the tubes. durrrrrr

I would rather use a parking service and kill the domain's traffic than sending it to them. But I even won a domain case against a huge travel agency(I use their trademarked name), so I can't imagine anyone losing a domain case since then.

their argument is your money made in the last period and a couple of days of current one ;-)

NastyDollars has forced me to give them many domains. Not only domain names with their trademark, but also others. They have only a few trademarks, but they take any domain with one of their site name?s in it. If you don't want to have your account closed, you have to give them all the domains that they want. Also you should know that they copied my sites with HTTtrack and put them on their server. They only replaced my ref code to their?s. It concerns my doorways, TGPs, blogs. Now they use my designs and text that I pay to designers/writers for.

Totally and utterly fucked up right there. :mad:

That's even more fucked up if that is indeed what they are doing.

man i know your work and exactly the same is happenning to me right now. i dont want to talk more till i did not receive reply from nd, but something really smells ... :2 cents:

nevermind

They did the same thing to me, copied my complete sites changing only the ref code.

Ok so here's the thing folks...

In order for someone to sue you and take a domain you have they must have a mark on the entire name...

e.g. bestxxxporn.com

The entire thing... Trademarked... That's the only way for them to have 100% legal grounds to do so... and that's only if you don't have prior art (I believe). It gets trickier when you start talking about just bestxxxporn without the .com... However, there is no judge that will rule in favor of me taking someone else's domain that has that within the name (e.g. mybestxxxporn.com, ibestxxxporn.com) ...

Sounds like they're using a bunch of scare tactics and cash to unlawfully usurp domains... of course, if you sign it over to them, it's theirs lawfully...

It sounds like they

some of the biggest companies i thought were rock solid are consolidating and cutting staff and making late payments so anything is possible.

That sucks, great info BestPornXXX...

Seriously man, I don?t know you, but how DARE you come on this board and try to educate people, use common sense and try to calm people down by explaining how business works. People here don?t want that....they want to talk shit, not business. They want to talk drama, not strategy.

Im sure you are wrong and a company like ND isn?t doing it for the reasons you've stated. Im sure a company that has for many yrs made many, many , many millions of dollars a yr has gotten around the conference table and decided that they should do this not to protect their brands, but for the sole purpose of making people mad.

In case anyone needs the link to explain what Im talking about above, here ya go http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm

If they have actual trademarks on the names then they have every right. If not, why would you hand over the domains? Send the traffic to similar sites at other sponsors. Not rocket science.

Andrej, I check the WIPO cases on a daily basis... winning a domain case is rare.

and you would get your ND account killed then.
its better to give them what they want in my case...

I never promoted them much, but yes, if I did, I would be fucked.

well that will make some webmasters angry and they gonna register future domains just to fuck with SERPs on nasty's sites ;-)

can you post that link again? Was that a list of the sites they are trying to take over? Where was that hosted.... on one of nastydollars servers????

Don't you think them taking the domains then keeping the design is shady? They are obviously just fucking the person over that took the time to get a good position in the search engines.

If they want the domains, fine. But they have no right to keep someone else's site design.

Wow, so are they even keeping the WM id?

I could understand that they may want control over the domains like server wise, but to rip them from the WMs is another story.

Still to this day at TopBucks we allow people to register similar domains as ours. We even have one guy that registered all of our mobile domains with .mobi.

As long as they promote us we are fine with it. I find it so odd that companies are alienating webmasters.

nasty is fucking up big time and creating many enemies in the process. times are changing

2009 - Add noindex/nofollow and canonical urls to 95% of our landing pages and paysites, lets effective REMOVE all affiliate links from the google index, and 'sculpt' our own paysites to the top spots.

2010 - Let's peel all domains that may seem to infringe on our trademarks. Not all of them, just select ones, we only want the ones with good earnings, or that look appealing to us.

2011 - Fuck it, dump affiliates all together, dont be shocked, we've been working towards this for the last few years.

so i can add topbucks as another program to promote?
swank and sextronics too...

Yes, our goal is to help our affiliates send traffic and help convert that traffic to sales. If there is something that you need from us that is out of the normal, let us know. We love trying new things and are very open-minded.

I need to save that statement somewhere just in case

this is bad news for a few of my friends. Luckily I sold most of my trademark domain sites a while back. I would be really pissed

this is how it should be. no the honest webmasters not stealing their content and sending them sales and solely promoting them get fucked. the guys with the tubes who steal their content and dont promote them still keep going right along. I suggest everyone whos getting bent over by ND by this show them they made the wrong choice. Join the other side pirate their content and open huge tubes and give their shit away for free and promote dating sites with their domain names in it. host overseas and let their fucking lawyers have a hay day.

Looks like I will be switching most my energy on TopBucks sites from now on...