The other day I wrote The Best Affiliate Program. Earlier in the year Ben Edelman wrote about the worst.

He points to CoolSavings and MyPoints, both prominent affiliate programs on CJ, LinkShare and FastClick. What Ben accuses them of (and actually has proof in his article) is partnering with adware companies to show popups encouraging users to sign up for their programs on partner websites.

Listen to this:

CoolSavings’ and MyPoints’ pop-ups appear as users browse affiliate merchants’ web sites. For example, a CoolSavings pop-up (shown above, at left) appeared as I browsed Buy.com, a CoolSavings partner: Buy.com pays CoolSavings for sending it customers. But despite this alliance and despite applicable affiliate network rules, CoolSavings still uses use Direct Revenue to grab Buy.com customers.

When MyPoints performs similar targeting of its merchant partners, MyPoints explicitly attempts to capitalize on its partners’ goodwill. In the areas blocked out in green (in the right screenshot above), MyPoints specifically names the company a user was visiting before MyPoints interrupted. These references give MyPoints’ ads a further appearance of legitimacy. But the references simultaneously tarnish MyPoints’ partners’ good names — by putting their names into Direct Revenue pop-ups.

Wow…that’s sleazy. I was appalled looking at the sample screenshots Ben has on his site. I went out to my affiliate network sites and made sure I wasn’t particpating in any of their programs.

Go take a look at the article and you’ll probably do the same.

Social Bookmarking icons - Share and enjoy.
                           

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 5:09 pm.
Filed under Affiliate Programs, Affiliate Marketing, Profit Enhancement.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.