On Wednesday Spanish authorities announced the arrest of three alleged ringleaders behind the Mariposa botnet. Mariposa is possibly the largest botnet yet discovered and consisted of an estimated 12.7 million computers. The extent of the virus-infection is staggering: more than 190 countries, over half of the Fortune 1,000 large enterprises and at least 40 major banks were … [Read more...]
Winning With Authority
It's all good - from online advertising being up 25 percent, according to the IAB; to online commerce on the rise 23 percent, according to comScore; to Google search queries that are up 41 percent, per Nielsen//NetRatings. It's clear that online marketing grew strongly through the first three quarters of 2007.However, as industries grow, so does the attention paid by state and … [Read more...]
Marketing Muscle
Over the years stories about intimidation and goons knocking on the doors of various affiliates and search marketers have circulated at industry events. Some of these scary accounts have taken on a life of their own - much like a game of telephone where fact and fiction are often intertwined as the stories are told over and over again. The victims claim to have seen a variety … [Read more...]
A Call to Action
Someone is hijacking your traffic and stealing your commissions. That someone might be a competing affiliate marketer, or worse, the merchant whose products you are promoting. To my dismay, I discovered that traffic from one of my sites was being diverted when a friend sent me some screen captures of that site's home page. The first screen shot showed my site open in a browser … [Read more...]
Leading the Way
Online lead generation gets no respect. Online lead generation affiliates less so. While the sector is growing by leaps and bounds - 290 percent over 2005, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau - people like Peter Martin and Robert Jewell just seem to drag its reputation through the mud. These guys had the honor of being sued by New York State Attorney General Eliot … [Read more...]
The Cookie Conundrum
Cookies will drive you nuts. As you know, cookies - or very small files that recognize you as uniquely you to particular websites - are kind of the backbone of affiliate marketing. If the cookie didn't exist, there would be no way for you to claim the sale or track your core customers. This would effectively kill affiliate sites in their tracks.Or will it? Recent studies on … [Read more...]
Clean Sweep
You're thinking of working with a merchant, but you don't want to be involved in any program that includes affiliates using questionable, if not illegal, practices. But how can you know for sure whose program is squeaky clean and whose is not?It's not easy to tell which merchants have clean programs. Maybe that's because it's not easy to pin down exactly what "clean" … [Read more...]
Being Ben Edelman
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more knowledgeable or dedicated than Ben Edelman when it comes to the evils of spyware. The 24-year-old assiduously tracks the proliferation of adware from his own computer lab. He's a fierce critic of spyware practices and has testified in several high-profile adware-related lawsuits.Talk about overachievers: Edelman is a Ph.D. candidate … [Read more...]
Stumped About Stopping Spyware
Tuan Le is mad. And when he's upset, he speaks quietly, deliberately and very thoughtfully. He's hardly a hothead. But nothing gets him more riled up, if you can call it that, than knowing he's losing a large percentage of revenue from his two affiliate Web sites to other affiliates that are acting in unethical and unfair ways. Le, who's been an affiliate for the last few years … [Read more...]
Been There Done That: Q & A with Shawn Collins
It's very difficult to find anyone in affiliate marketing better known than Shawn Collins, who earned his first commissions more than seven years ago.Wearing his newest hat, as president/CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting, he provides outsourced affiliate program management. But he is, perhaps, better known as a co-founder of Affiliate Summit, as the author of the top-selling book … [Read more...]
Cyber Creeps
When thousands of consumers got emails asking them to help electronics retailer Best Buy combat Internet fraud, they were eager to help. But those who clicked on the link and entered credit card and Social Security numbers learned the ugly truth too late: They'd been had.The link took them to a "spoof" page that looked just like Best Buy's home page but was actually operated by … [Read more...]