A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

eBay is once again making waves in the affiliate community with the most recent tidal wave of deciet crashing on the shores of Shawn Hogan. You may know Shawn Hogan as the owner and operator of the shadowy webmaster forum DigitalPoint which boasts a dazzling array of con-artists, schemers and scammers from all over the globe. It seems Mr. Hogan himself now stands accused of taking part in an elaborate scheme to defraud eBay’s affiliate programs whilst the program was under Commission Junction’s watch. Could it be possible that there is a link between the recent class action lawsuit against Commission Junction? Could it be that a band of rouge black hat webmasters and affiliates were operating out of DigitalPoint forums and they devised a sinister plan to rip off other affiliates while ripping off the auction giant eBay?

Here’s a sampling of the buzz from around the blogosphere.

As far as I can tell, the story originated from Charles G. Mullen’s blog and he was the one who also started the thread at Shawn’s own DigitalPoint forums. Charles’ blog cited this site with a pdf file of the court documents.

Monty’s Mega Marketing hit the front of Sphinn with a regurgitation of the factual elements of the story.

The ever eloquent Linda Buquet of 5 Star Affiliate Marketing blogs added one of the most significant entries in the Shawn Hogan cookie stuffing saga with an exceptional post that takes the cheated affiliate’s perspective against the black hatters who are creating havoc in the affiliate marketing industry.

Further on the line, Zooped.com tagged the story with some heavy handed keywords such as low life, piece of sh!t, scamer, scammer, Shawn Hogan, theif. Wow, somebody else must have been banned at DigitalPoint :-) (thanks again Shoemoney)

According to Justia Federal District Court Filings and Dockets (the most reliable source I could find), the suit was filed on August 25, 2008 and a summons was issued to defendants Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Kevin Dunning on August 26, 2008.

One of the defendants in the case, Brian Dunning has appeared on CNN when he was the CTO of Buylink Corporation. His website claims “I participate at whatever level you require. I’ve done everything from providing $7.5 million in venture capital, to hiring the right exec team, to sitting down and personally coding; and everything in between.”

Suprising, there’s not mention of cookie stuffing found in his resume :-)

The initial court filing claims that DigitalPoint Solutions had developed software that not only stuffed visitors browsers with eBay cookies but that they knew what they were doing was illegal because they coded the software never to stuff the same visitor’s browser more than one time to avoid detection. DPS accomplished their cookie stuffing by using a code generated image that did the dirty work before sending the image headers and displaying the 1×1 pixel image. The use of iFrames which is a traditional method for accomplishing cookie stuffing was avoided as to not arouse suspicion from eBay and Commission Junction.

Clearly this all shows a knowledgable intent to defraud eBay and Commission Junction, not to mention to steal other affiliates commissions from right under their noses.

On the funny side, here’s some of the most hilarious comments from the DigitalPoint and other threads…

joh1 - Shawn and others who took part in this, if you all did this; you all have my respect.

Tobidotman - People told me this forum was garbage, but it’s good to me, but i don’t want to be associated with a thief, yet i don’t know the full story.

edenz - Hats off…. Shawn.. Today I have become one of yours fan. I hope we could meet one day.

timsdd - maybe you could bake him a cake with a saw in it

kristeejo (at V7n)- bet they won’t have cookies like that in the ebay prison. hey - if he goes to prison wonder if ebay will let us bid on his bond?

Regardless of these two other defendants and Shawn Hogan’s efforts to stuff affiliate cookies, it is my belief that the true responsibility for tracking affiliate commissions lies with not only the affiliate management network but the actual merchant themselves. I can’t believe that eBay would be so slack that they never bothered to question commissions they paid out until now. Could it be that eBay is experiencing financial turmoil and they are clutching at straws to make ends meet? The recent events surrounding the eBay/EPN “night of the long knives” affiliate termination saga certainly paint a disturbing picture for eBay’s future.

eBay’s stock has plummeted from a 52 week high of 40.73 to barely keeping head above the 20 per share mark. That’s a decline by almost half of their value and they are keeping pace with Google to become one of the biggest tech stock disasters since the dot com bust sank many a fortune in a sea of sorrow back in the late 1990’s. If eBay were riding high like they were two years ago, they might overlook something as boring as cookie stuffing affiliates but today, eBay is out for nickles and dimes and they have shown they are ready to unleash their lawyers on black hat punks far and wide.

         

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  As many of my readers probably know (and probably agree with), I’m not a fan of free blogging services. Why? Let’s face it, human nature tells us that giving away free stuff brings out the worst in people. However, the sheer amounts of spam, scam and junk blogs hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services is seriously polluting the internet with downright trash. If one of us webmasters or bloggers were to host such a site that contains so much duplicate content, copyrighted materials and just plain garbage, Google would surely penalize our sites, regardless if there were any useful content presented in between the junk. Is this yet one more clear cut sign that Google, the “Do no Evil” company has painfully mutated into a “double standards” company? Heaven knows they have the resources to clean up their act.

Does Google really care? Hell no. Why do I care? As a webmaster who owns several blogs, several forums and a human edited blog directory, I have been spending hours per day removing spammer links from my sites that point back at these abominable free blogging services. Does that mean I think all free blog services are tools for spammers? No it doesn’t. I have never had a single problem with spammers dropping links to Wordpress free hosted blogs. Why? Because Wordpress heavily moderates their free blogs and they remove blogs that don’t meet their quality criteria. Not to mention, Wordpress doesn’t allow Adsense (or any other form of monetization) on their free blogs which makes them useless to spammers.

You might be thinking to yourself, “Google allows you to flag a spammy blog”, well, maybe they do have a flag button at the top of every free hosted blog, but I’m certain that button doesn’t work because I’ve used it numerous times to no effect.

I’ve already gotten into the habit with every new blog I bring up for my network or for a client, that the first thing I do is add “blogger.com” and “blogspot.com” to the comment blacklist. I do the same thing for every forum I install. The first thing is to add those two domains to the list of censored words on the forum.

As for my blog directory, I just had some joker submit 700+ spam blogs hosted on blogger.com and he did them all by hand because the submit form for my directory is nearly impossible to automate (unless you’re a libcurl genius and can crack captchas). This person even email confirmed each individual entry. I kid you not, 700+ blogs he bothered to create on blogger.com and then starts submitting them to my directory !!! I have to give the guy some credit because it must have taken him several hours unless he had a boiler room full of Nigerian 419 spammers working for him when they were on a break from creating phishing schemes. All his work was removed from my directory with one SQL statement that took me all of 30 seconds to write and execute. Zap, bye bye…

The point I’m trying to make is that Google is so anal retentive about every other webmasters’ content (especially ones not paying for Adwords) and they continually regurgitate their quality guidelines through their sock puppet Matt Cutts. Not to mention, Google wants to tell us how to create our sites, how to link to and from our sites and basicly when we should take a dump, but in the meantime, besides their shady Adsense for Domains and Adsense for error pages, Google has created the most massive FFA, link farm, spam farm ever witnessed on the internet. Not even Angelfire, Tripod and other free website junkyards could ever hold a candle to the massive abomination that Blogger and Blogspot have become.

It’s worthy to note Google doesn’t offer a contact for support on these services but they do have a notorious spam bot that has been locking legitimate bloggers out of their accounts. Way to go !!

What do you think? Is Google allowing the creation of spam farms on Blogger and Blogspot? Do they have a double standard for content on their network versus other networks ?

Off rant…

         

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  The eBay Partner Network forums are buzzing with angry affiliates following the latest wave of expiration notices that were sent to members last night. It seems eBay has terminated a large number of affiliates from their program and this has caused a great deal of controversy amongst some of the upper echelon who have been earning in upwards of thousands of dollars per month using eBay’s lucrative affiliate program. An semi-formal announcement was made by eBay representative SteveH regarding the mass terminations which has not been very well received by the majority of affiliates and promoters who are voicing their opinions regarding this statement :

I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night. These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources. Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program. We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days. Sincerely, Steve

I have a guess as to what SteveH is alluding to by the statement “we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity”

Actually, it’s not a guess, what he’s saying is that there is rampant cookie stuffing going on and that EPN has devised some algorithm (metrics) to mass detect apparent black hat sites which game eBay’s tracking cookies. While I personally applaud EPN for taking action against black hatters who make a living by cheating, my concern is with sincere, white hat publishers who may come under scrutiny due to false positives revealed by EPN’s untested metrics and fraud detection algorithms.

Undertandably, the portion of SteveH’s statement in regards to how engaged visitors are when they land on eBay from an affilaite link shows that EPN’s staff must be thinking anybody who clicks an affiliate link and lands on eBay should stay there for a certain amount of time before “bouncing”. In reality, high bounce rates are not indicative of an affiliate site engaging in cookie stuffing or tricking visitors to visit eBay. Quite possibly, a high bounce rate could be indicative of a visitor’s lack of interest in eBay itself and never had the intention of engaging with eBay for any reason other than to see the item listing they clicked on.

One such case that causes alarm for me as an affiliate - I have routinely used high priced items in a particular collectible niche as a lure to entice my website visitors to click on the eBay affiliate links to see these expensive items. While my thinking is that someone might click through to see the $500K Lambroughini and end up bidding on a pair of fuzzy dice, it nonetheless discredits my use of human nature to transfer visitors from my site to eBays. I routinely click on eBay auction listings from third party sites if my interest is peaked but in my case, after being ripped off several times on eBay years ago, I would never consider bidding or buying anything on eBay ever again. So I am a chronic eBay “bouncer” who has no interest in “engaging” with eBay and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Another scenario I’ve seen successfully used to lead visitors to eBay through affiliate links is by linking to strange, bizzare auctions or controversial items that might resolve a click out of curiosity. This technique has served many bloggers and forum owners well to generate eBay affilaite commissions. However, there is a guaranteed high bounce rate when leading people to eBay to see something shocking.

Regardless of whatever EPN is doing to limit cookie stuffing and other fraudulent commission generation, I do not believe their method of handling affiliates in such an unprofessional manner is making EPN a trustworthy program for most affiliates to spend their time and money promoting. In the end, handling affiliates (even the black hat ones) en masse and making giant waves in the community has made EPN one of the most unprofessionally managed affiliate programs available to publishers and the biggest bomb I’ve ever seen in my 10+ years of affiliate marketing.

In my humble opinion, cheaters should be handled one by one in private. Light should not be shed on the termination of affiliates in such a wide scope because the overall effect is disconcerting to honest promoters who become filled with fear over having their accounts terminated. Perhaps EPN is taking a page from the Google Adsense playbook and using scare tactics in a vain attempt to keep affiliates in line? Either way, it’s their loss at the end of the day because the migration from programs such as EPN and Adsense is already coming full circle.

What do you think? Are you happy with eBay/EPN and their decisions to do mass affiliate slapping in front of everybody ??

         

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