Affiliates are Scumbags

[mandy]

Here at IRCE, I'm in a workshop around affiliates and along with 80% of the attendees, I'm sitting here with my jaw open because instead of offering ways to maximize your affiliate business, this workshop has essentially been a 90 minute rant about what scum-bags affiliates are and tons of data that are essentially telling retailers to scale back or do extreme policing of their affiliate programs...

What's a retailer to do?
At the end of the day, the panel seemed to be saying that it's time to drop the hammer on affiliate programs, cull out the bad guys and focus more on Web 2 kinds of activities like blogs, user-generated-content, etc...

full article: http://www.csestrategies.com/cse/2008/06...ing-f.html

Two old TT quotes on affiliate fraud:

[quote author=bargainbloodhound link=topic=37.msg131#msg131 date=1122226384]

Yeah, the subject of click fraud still makes us  and we haven't done any paid advertising in 4 years.  We lost thousands of $$ to click fraud when we used Commission Junction for 2 years to run an affiliate program for one of our sites.  CJ's records would show 3-5,000 daily clickthroughs to our site...and our server logs would show that the actual number of visitors we received from CJ links was only 500-1,000.  We also had an affiliate program for another one of our sites for a very short time at ClickXchange in 2000/2001 and the affiliate click fraud there was even worse.
[/quote]
[quote author=bargainbloodhound link=topic=1039.msg4026#msg4026 date=1130709614]
There is a glaring omission in that article: the subject of affiliate fraud.  During 1998-2001 when we used to use a combination of Commission Junction, ClickXchange, and ShareASale to run the affiliate programs for our sites we were losing $1000s of dollars a year due to being ripped off by fraudulent clicks and sales leads by our affiliates.

Here's an article from earlier this year on preventing affiliate fraud.  Do a search  and you'll find several other articles/sites on the 'net with tips on how to prevent/reduce affiliate fraud if you setup an affiliate program for your business.
[/quote]