Rule-breaking Commission Junction affiliates most often observed by our automation

Rule-breaking LinkShare affiliates most often observed by our automation

The duration of these practices

We are particularly struck by the longevity of many of these affiliates -- by all indications, escaping detection by networks' traffic quality systems. The tables above report many affiliates persisting for 6+ months, a bound resulting largely from when we setup the new automation that prepared this data. In fact quite a few of these affiliates have been engaged in similar conduct for far longer. For example, one of us (Ben) has tracked Usadollarsaver (LinkShare #6, an adware-using affiliate) since February 2009. Similarly, Ben first alerted clients to CJ affiliates 3316988 and 2202912 (#4 and #8, both typosquatters) in November 2010 and November 2009, respectively.

In our view, each of these affiliates unambiguously violates clear network rules. But by all indications, these affiliates remain in good standing in their respective networks. Reasonable network quality practices should have long ago uncovered these affiliates and excised them from networks in order to protect all merchants. Instead, it seems networks have allowed these affiliates to remain within their platforms -- continuing to target merchants who have no reason to suspect the affiliates' rule-breaking.

Scope of reporting

We mentioned above that we focus on clear violations. Specifically, we focus on spyware/adware, cookie-stuffing, and typosquatting.

What have we excluded? We intentionally removed "loyalty programs." On one hand there are good grounds for conern at these affiliates: They often provide browser plug-ins or toolbars that seek to charge affiliate fees even when users specifically request merchants' sites. Sometimes these plug-ins arrive on users' computers without consent or without the required disclosures. And these plug-ins tend to force clicks in ways that are clearly impermissible for ordinary affiliates. Because loyalty programs tend to promote hundreds of merchants, they trigger our automation repeatedly, so they would ordinarily appear in our top-10 lists. But we don't report loyalty programs here -- they're complicated enough to be a topic for another day.

We present the ten Commission Junction and LinkShare most often observed by our automation. We note that this may omit or underreport some sophisticated affiliates who take steps to conceal their behavior. For example, if an affiliate drops cookies at most once per IP address, we might not catch the affiliate sufficiently often for it to make our top-10 lists, yet the affiliate might nonetheless enjoy large earnings. We note that these tactics are increasingly widespread. Indeed, in civil litigation, eBay alleges that former eBay affiliates Brian Dunning and Shawn Hogan used exactly this method to avoid detection.

Last Updated: December 21, 2012 - Sign up for notification of major updates and related work.