Ben Edelman: How Affiliate Programs Fund Spyware
Ben Edelman, wherever you are -- you're one of my heros. Keep Fightin' the Good Fight (tm).
Ben writes in his blog:
Affiliate networks offer an appealing promise for supporting free, independent content on the web: Any ordinary user can sign up to promote any interested merchant via a special affiliate tracking link. When a user clicks the link and makes a purchase from the merchant, the referring web site ("affiliate") gets a payment from the merchant. Since merchants only pay affiliates when users actually make purchases, merchants feel free to partner with smaller affiliate sites -- sites that might otherwise be too small or quirky to get advertisers' attention.
Despite the promise of affiliate marketing, these casual marketing arrangements entail serious risks. If merchants sign up affiliates without investigation or monitoring, merchants risk accepting partners with undesirable business practices. Consider an affiliate who sends spam, or whose site is so controversial that no reasonable merchant would want to be seen there. So, experienced merchants have learned, they must monitor their affiliates for these kinds of dubious behaviors.
posted by Fergie @ 9/14/2005 03:08:00 PM
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