I'm concerned with findings from a quick bit of research today..
I'd like to invite networks to state if they have policing methods in force to ensure that 'affiliates' are not using adware on their network.
Apart from all networks stating they 'take it serisouly' affiliates are still ripping off other affiliates, this practice MUST stop IMHO - and in part its the networks responsibility.
The networks will make their money whatever happens, but its unethical, rips off their clients, damages affiliate marketing and should be rectified now.
We're already drawing up tools to help... but why should it be up to us?
Reliably detecting people using spyware to promote merchants is not easy but we do have two threads to our policing.
The first is the monitoring of traffic patterns. Spyware use very often leads to patterns in traffic which give us a pointer that a particular affiliate is enaged in this practice.
The second is to actively interrogate the spyware websites to see if anyone is targetting certain terms relating to our merchants. As you can appreciate this is quite a task as the number of keywords which could be targetted is massive and a search has to be repeated many times as an ad will not always be served.
As I'm sure you are aware, we do suspend affiliatte accounts as soon as we confirm thhat someone is using spyware.
We use various resources, both internal and external, to categorize affiliates as adware. Once we have recognized an affiliate as adware in nature, they will be added to our internal fraud/adware detector for merchants, and any merchants who have these affiliates in their system will lose their "parasite-free" label, clearly visible to affiliates within the Kolimbo.com network.
What policing do Network have in force?
Linear Mode
