How do you feel about affiliate "parasites"?

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WeBcYtE

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You will hear a lot of bitching and whining about "parasites" if you go to an affiliate site like ABW, but there are a lot of them out there and obviously they work, very very well.

What is a parasite? It's a piece of software, usually part of a virus, spyware or adware, that runs on a user's computer. What it does is create and rewrite affiliate cookies on the user's computer in order to have any commissions credited to their own account.

Affliliates view this as stealing (despite the fact that it is not yet illegal), while those who do it probably view it as really easy money so who cares what those bitches think. While many users may be deceived into installing software which contains parasite functionality (deceptively installing software is illegal, or in the darker part of the grey area), some people do not care.

Now before you choose one side or the other, lets pretend that you had access to software which you could use for your own financial gain. $xx,xxx per month...per day? Would you, or does it cause an ethical dilemma for you?
:anon.sml:
 


thats a good one. i wouldn't care about installing it on the users computer unless it harmed the PC in anyway...

and I do need the money...

edit- i think i misunderstood what it did before...it would certainly be tempting if it is not illegal, but i do not think i could bring my self to do it.
 
I personally consider this blacker than black..not grey.

It totally undermines the whole affiliate process. Why would I be for a way that undermines tons of my own work?

Of course, it is my opinion.

You really think anyone will download software from your sig link after that post?
 
Actually if you look up a company called 180 Solutions, you will see that you can get into serious legal hotwater doing this.

Hey, I am sure a burglar can rationalise their actions too, and apparently you'll never meet more "innocent people" than you do in prison.

But the rest of the population will view you as the amoral, thieving sack of shit that you are.

If you can live with that, then go for it.
 
Did 180 Solutions get into legal trouble for overwriting the affiliate cookies, or was it because they were sending personal user data back to their database?
 
Well, my personal view is in agreement with the rest of the posters. I myself am a merchant and I found out about parasites the hard way - by having an affiliate who keeps earning commissions but never seems to send any traffic (and the referring site is crap). Needless to say, I deleted that affiliate promptly and keep an eye out for similar trends.

The thing is, a lot of people on this forum run MFA sites, which for most merchants does nothing other than inflate the cost of using AdWords. I'm sure that these people may be considered "thieves" in a sense, similar to affiliate parasites, since they are in essence polluting search engines and PPC programs with spam.

I'm just here to talk about it so I really hold nothing against anyone who runs a MFA or parasite, but I do find it odd that people here think nothing of spamming SEs to bilk money out of merchants while providing no real service, yet have a problem with parasites which are a more sophisticated version of the same thing. It's like saying: "Stealing is ok if you steal from Best Buy, but if you steal from some guy's house you're the scum of the earth". It's quite the contradiction.
 
Jon said:
Did 180 Solutions get into legal trouble for overwriting the affiliate cookies, or was it because they were sending personal user data back to their database?
Click to expand...

Both WhenU and 180Solutions both got sued for deceptive tactics used to get their software onto the user's machine. Most of the time their crap was "snuck" on via a drive-by install or misleading download.

If the user is informed of what the software does and accepts to install it, then there is nothing illegal about having that software rewrite affiliate cookies.
 
WeBcYtE said:
Both WhenU and 180Solutions both got sued for deceptive tactics used to get their software onto the user's machine. Most of the time their crap was "snuck" on via a drive-by install or misleading download.

If the user is informed of what the software does and accepts to install it, then there is nothing illegal about having that software rewrite affiliate cookies.
Click to expand...

See, I can see getting into trouble for using misleading or malicious means to get people to download and install their filth, that should be illegal if it isn't already. But even as an affiliate myself, there should be no laws against rewriting affiliate codes. Would I do it myself, not intentionally, but that's just the game we play. Anyone can overwrite Amazon affiliate codes, it just depends who's code was last seen by the user before the purchase, and then it gets auto-rewritten. But that has been an issue that has gone on for many years now, and it still happens with almost every affiliate program out there now anyhow, so you can't completely blame the spyware guys for every changed code, because someone advertising to a user you got credit for last week can easily get credit for a new purchase this week. It's just the way it works really. I guess I just see a business potential in everything, both good and bad.
 
I see an inherent difference in MFA and Aff commission stealing.

MFA produces a visitor that would not necessarily have been sent, had the mfa site not been in existence. Therefore a middle man produces some (albeit debatable) value - really no different to arbitrage in any other market. The value is in finding cheap traffic and selling it high.

Parasitic practices incur a cost for the Merchant that would not have been there otherwise. The traffic was already there, the sale was already there and the commision is simply stolen. The value add simply doesn't exist - even in a debatable form.
 
The reason why most of the adware companies have gotten in trouble is due to the terms of service. In the past programmers would package the adware with their software and get paid on install (so yes, the adware industry has their own affiliates.) The problem was some of these affiliates just set the adware to auto-install without the terms of service and it made a big mess.

The fact is, a lot of companies that run affiliate offers buy adware traffic to their sites. The biggest example right now is adultfriendfinder. Someone is on your site, and they get a pop up directly to AFF with no referral id. No commission.
 
That's the reason I wouldn't bother with Zango, aside from their questionable reputation. They pay you $0.45 to get someone to install their shitware and you don't even get a cut of the huge $$$ they'll make because of that. If I got a residual kickback from all the ad revenue they generate as a result of installs I got for them, then I'd be much more willing to consider zango.

I think that the bigger Adware companies have become a bit more responsible in their distribution practices, probably from legal pressure from consumer interest groups and others. Their software now has a disclosure of what it is, and is easier to uninstall. In fact, WhenU is no longer on AdAware's definition file.

Even so, there are still a lot of "rogue" sites such as "smiley central" that infect peoples' computers with spyware using drive-by methods, i.e. installing the software via active-x or java in the background.
 
Who said that Smiley Central installs spyware on your computer??
I don't think that Smiley Central installs any spyware or adware on your computer!
Anyway, I used to do Smiley Central in the past a lot & gave me great revenue...
I did'nt lose sleep over it: spyware or not (as long as the company providing the service is legit)! :)
 
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