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Originally Posted by bapages
Nice to participate in the thread if I knew what 'Phorm' was!
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It is called a search engine - do a search on the words 'Phorm' and 'Webwise' and you will find the press and blogs from USA to England, Germany and Denmark all against the concept.
While you are about it, you may as well learn about the other players in the field who have been secretly doing this since 2001 in UK. USA looks like it may only have started about 2003. Although, if it has taken people in the UK 7 years to discover what the lower cost ISPs have been doing to earn revenue then it could have been in USA much earlier.
It is not easy to find the 'infected' ISPs - you need to search the T&C and privacy statements for mention of providing 3rd parties information about your surfing for direct marketing.
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Originally Posted by aotagain
Some time ago the Phorm website showed what was called a 'bridge' advert, which is no longer there.
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I wish I had seen that. Are you sure it was phorm and not adzilla, nebuad, frontporch or one of the other players?
Phorm is working very hard at not being detected. Over the last couple of months the techies have been working very hard at detecting phorm and phorm has been making good use of all the free information that the techies have provided to debug the scripts and make it even harder to spot.
The weakest factor is the forged cookie which a site can easily detect and warn its visitors that their browser has been hijacked and been given code which has evaded basic browser security features.
Phorm really don't want websites warning people off which is why they are working on a cookie free solution. They are also trying to work around the hosts file directing webwise.net to 127.0.0.1 preventing anyone whose data stream is intercepted from gaining access to the internet on port 80.
The frontporchs and nebuads of this world work off modifying the delivered site code and that is easily detected by server side and client side scripting comparing results and warning visitors that the code they are seeing has been modified on route and is no longer the code written by the site. They are doing what phorm and BT were doing during the 2006 and 2007 trials.
Getting back to affiliate networks. Do they want the ads they serve up being highlighted with 'webwise is on' or 'webwise is off' with every ad? And that data can only be supplied by reading forged cookies on the visitor's computer, checking the database for the highest paying relevant 'channel' and then displaying the ad. The networks won't have any idea which website will be displaying the adverts so they won't be able to determine whether or not the 'affiliate site' meets the merchant's marketing 'ethics'.
Has anybody seen anything about click fraud prevention or reporting? The business model is PPV or PPC - how will that affect the merchant's ability to fund their affiliate programme? Will merchants who pay less than 5% still be viable? If they need to increase their prices to pay for increased advertising costs, there is only one person who ends up paying that cost.