One would think that it is common sense to have a separate section prohibiting parasitic affiliate behaviors in your affiliate program and your program agreement. However, even larger online merchants sometimes do not do so. First of all, this makes them significantly more vulnerable to rogue affiliates. Secondly, it makes it harder to fight such [...]

Continue reading about Walmart Affiliate Program Now Prohibits Parasitic Behaviors

Geno on February 16th, 2010

Today Kellie Stevens of AffiliateFairPlay.com has published her first free public adware reports: The two reports that are already available are: (i) A report on AllFreeCoupons, a Firefox add-on which displays coupon/deal notifications when the visitor is on a website that may have such available, and also offers the website visitor to share the deal [...]

Continue reading about Kellie Stevens Publishes Two Free Public Adware Reports

Geno on September 3rd, 2009

In continuation of my last two posts, and pondering on some of the comments at Econsultancy.com, let’s see what parties can benefit from adware pop-ups, and if anyone really gets hurt. To begin with, let’s list who is involved in the game: (a) adware affiliate, (b) merchant,  (c) affiliate network, (d) sometimes an O(A)PM, and [...]

Continue reading about Who Benefits & Who Gets Hurt By Adware Affiliates

I have been thinking and discussing the issue of parasitic affiliates a lot over the past 40 hours (since the publication of this post, and the recording of this video), and there are 2 things that stand out to me as the main downsides of having a parasitic/adware adware affiliate aboard an affiliate program: 1. [...]

Continue reading about Parasitic / Adware Affiliates Hinder Affiliate Program Growth

Geno on January 28th, 2009

Let me start with a story, a true story. I hosted a table at the last Affiliate Summit’s Meet Market. Meet Markets are networking events held for the purpose of affiliates, merchants, affiliate networks, outsourced affiliate program managers, and other agencies to “meet-and-greet” each other during the first day of the conference. At one point [...]

Continue reading about ShopAtHome.com or How Affiliate Marketing Gets Hurt