I have a ZoneAlarm® Pro Firewall installed on my machine. This morning when I turned my computer on, it ran a routine scan for spyware and threats, and deleted the following cookies:
Two of the above (Apmebf and Qksrv) are Commission Junction (CJ) cookies, and one (Linksynergy) is a LinkShare cookie. All of these are set on the end-users’ machines to track affiliate-referred transactions.
The irony of the situation is that besides their recently launched program on the Google Affiliate Network ZoneAlarm has an older affiliate program on Commission Junction [details here]. When I click a CJ affiliate’s ZoneAlarm link, and land on the merchant’s website, it is precisely the Apmebf cookie that gets set on my machine:
Apparently, it gets set only to be deleted during the next routine clean-up of unwanted cookies, which obviously hurts ZoneAlarm itself. How ironic!
Although this action hurts the value of their program (to affiliates) it certainly doesn’t hurt the profitability of it. I had a discussion at ASW09 with the folks at OneNetworkDirect about why affiliates might not wish to promote Lavasoft in their program lineup. Same problem.
Yes, Nancy, of course, you’re right. It doesn’t hurt ZoneAlarm directly (if they get a sale, it doesn’t matter if the cookie triggers the commission or not; the sale still sticks), but hurts ZoneAlarm’s affiliates.
Interesting to find out that there is a similar problem with Lavasoft. I didn’t know that.
It appears to be a really widespread problem. Just saw this tweet about another firewall (AVG) blocking all LinkShare and some Commission Junction (including their own) affiliate links.