Forum Moderators: skibum
I would bet they'd bring a court action to stop ad substitution.
Sure they would. But the question is what their legal justifcation would be. Are people *required* to see *only* the ads that a broadcaster or publisher wants them to see? I don't think so.
My main point in all this is that it's a waste of time to worry about ethics in this industry beyond how it affects you directly. If you think someone is stealing your commissions, do something about it. Contact CJ or Linkshare or your senator or whoever. Complaining about it here accomplishes nothing.
I don't have any trouble with thieves stealing my commissions, because I don't do business with programs that allow them in, or at least I try not to. I just signed up for a program that has two charity coupon affiliates, because they have products that I need. But I'll keep a close watch on them for signs of tampering with my links.
I'm spending my time working on software to thwart the efforts of thieves so I can join other programs that have attracive product lines.
A TOS is not the law. Regardless, I have yet to see a TOS that says I can't replace someone else's affiliate code with my own.
TOS and contract agreements are not legally binding? What is the point of them then? I'm not talking about criminal court, I'm talking about civil court. But I still believe that there are antitrust issues going on, not to mention deceptive advertising and other ftc violations.
There are already several large lawsuits going on with some of them,
on the grounds of trademark violations.
"The adware will take the content of that page and redraw it to include links to *other* companies that provide web design and content creation services. "
Clear violation of copywrite? Stealing someones content and changing the look/function of it.
What do privacy policies have to do with it?
Um, breach of privacy policy can equal large lawsuits. Plus various privacy laws in general.
[ftc.gov...]
[ftc.gov...]
I was trying to say that the legal system probably won't be a solution for a bunch of small affiliates.
It's perfect for a class action lawsuit though. I mean most of those lawsuits are pretty frivolous. But this isn't.
[bigclassaction.com...]
[bigclassaction.com...]
I have yet to see a TOS that says I can't replace someone else's affiliate code with my own.
By that comment it seems that you do not understand what violation we are talking about here.
Most of all the TOS's do state that you can't use forced clicks or forced cookie stuffing, invisible pop-ups, pop-ups with the merchants site loaded etc. Anything that is not first user initiated with with the user first clicking on an affiliate "link" before the site can be loaded and cookie dropped. It's not as though these companies are just popping up ads that are in competition on the users computer and if that ad happens to attract that user more then what they were already surfing to it draws them away. That would at least be more fair because it would involve the initiation and interest of user to go with that offer instead. But that is not what they are doing. When the end user clicks on your affiliate link (like say in adwords) that takes them to say Ebay. As soon as Ebay loads with your affiliate link and drops your affiliate cookie into there browser, the adware company detects that the infected user just went to ebay.com and will launch an *invisible* pop-up with there own ebay affiliate code and rewrite your cookie. It's not the replacing of other affiliate cookies that is the problem. That is fine when you have a link that was the last one a user clicked on to get to a site and that replaces there cookie they may have had previously. But when the user never clicked on any ad of yours to begin with and actually clicked on someone else's ad that they just paid 50 plus cents for in Adwords and without the user's knowledge or consent or initiation you replace that code with your own, how is that o.k. with any merchant's TOS? That is highjacking. It disables competition when it is no longer the end users choice in a matter or initiation.
The advertisers certainly aren't going to abandon it unless the affiliates speak up... and affiliates generally can't afford turn off an entire network in protest.
The affiliates need to speak up but its most likely not just the affiliates that are getting ripped off. The merchants are probably paying out to affiliates where there was no real click generated.
Aside from the affiliate stuffing cookies, it seems like the only entity that doesn't get burned is the affiliate network that can laugh all the way to the bank as long as the sales dollars come from somewhere.
I've been thinking at some length about how to do this, and I'd be thrilled to work with any merchants that want to get this right.
