3 ms·

Except these are huge publicly traded companies. They money flow could easily be tracked from the advertiser to the scammer if efforts weren't being made to hid

Except these are huge publicly traded companies. They money flow could easily be tracked from the advertiser to the scammer if efforts weren't being made to hide it. So this is a moot point.

btilly 6y ago
OK, so you apparently believe that big companies perform magic. Meanwhile back in reality, a big company may have tens of thousands of affiliates or more. The affiliates all maintain that they are on the up and up, but any of them could be scammers. The company gets leads and doesn't know how they were generated. To see how easy it is, you can create a blog, register yourself as an affiliate for Amazon, and put a link on your blog. Boom. Now have your friend click on your link, and go buy something. Guess what? Amazon will pay you money! Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? Our sites look the same. We're both sending real customers who will pay real money. In this scenario if Amazon could catch me, they would. I'd be straight up cheating them, making them pay for traffic that I didn't generate.
- rhizome 6y ago
  > Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? How about: affiliate links are constructed to incorporate the affiliate tag so that they can't be rewritten. Yes, each link on your blog is different than the links on my blog for the same items, not just slapping a tag in a URL field. Of course, this would have engineering and hardware overhead on Amazon's side, but without something like this they're just retreading telco history in giving the world untraceable Caller ID, as you aptly illustrate.
  - btilly 6y ago
    You have downgraded my attack from "rewrite all Amazon links" to "rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate." And I can rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate if I don't mind just sending them to the Amazon home page. Which will probably be the behavior if an affiliate messes up the link (which they will do fairly reliably). The result is not a significant improvement over the current state, except that it becomes somewhat harder to be an affiliate.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      My solution eliminates the entire theft problem, and I'm not going to entertain the nirvana fallacy of "oh but unaffiliated urls can still be rewritten!" which is also goalpost-moving. Why would Amazon honor a broken affiliate link? They don't now.
- etrabroline 6y ago
  If a company's marketing strategy allows it to pay spammers to place illegal phone calls, then that marketing strategy is clearly negligent and should be illegal. The US phone system has existed for over a century and this only became a problem about 10 years ago. Clearly it is possible to market products in such a way as to not encourage crime. I have no idea what you are talking about with magic. If the advertiser has no idea which affiliate generates a sale, then how does it know how much to pay each one?
  - btilly 6y ago
    The advertiser knows which affiliate generated the sale. That is how affiliates get paid. The advertiser has no idea what techniques the affiliate used to generate that sale. That's the whole problem.

Except these are huge publicly traded companies. They money flow could easily be tracked from the advertiser to the scammer if efforts weren't being made to hide it. So this is a moot point.

btilly 6y ago

OK, so you apparently believe that big companies perform magic. Meanwhile back in reality, a big company may have tens of thousands of affiliates or more. The affiliates all maintain that they are on the up and up, but any of them could be scammers. The company gets leads and doesn't know how they were generated. To see how easy it is, you can create a blog, register yourself as an affiliate for Amazon, and put a link on your blog. Boom. Now have your friend click on your link, and go buy something. Guess what? Amazon will pay you money! Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? Our sites look the same. We're both sending real customers who will pay real money. In this scenario if Amazon could catch me, they would. I'd be straight up cheating them, making them pay for traffic that I didn't generate.

rhizome 6y ago
> Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? How about: affiliate links are constructed to incorporate the affiliate tag so that they can't be rewritten. Yes, each link on your blog is different than the links on my blog for the same items, not just slapping a tag in a URL field. Of course, this would have engineering and hardware overhead on Amazon's side, but without something like this they're just retreading telco history in giving the world untraceable Caller ID, as you aptly illustrate.
- btilly 6y ago
  You have downgraded my attack from "rewrite all Amazon links" to "rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate." And I can rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate if I don't mind just sending them to the Amazon home page. Which will probably be the behavior if an affiliate messes up the link (which they will do fairly reliably). The result is not a significant improvement over the current state, except that it becomes somewhat harder to be an affiliate.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    My solution eliminates the entire theft problem, and I'm not going to entertain the nirvana fallacy of "oh but unaffiliated urls can still be rewritten!" which is also goalpost-moving. Why would Amazon honor a broken affiliate link? They don't now.
etrabroline 6y ago
If a company's marketing strategy allows it to pay spammers to place illegal phone calls, then that marketing strategy is clearly negligent and should be illegal. The US phone system has existed for over a century and this only became a problem about 10 years ago. Clearly it is possible to market products in such a way as to not encourage crime. I have no idea what you are talking about with magic. If the advertiser has no idea which affiliate generates a sale, then how does it know how much to pay each one?
- btilly 6y ago
  The advertiser knows which affiliate generated the sale. That is how affiliates get paid. The advertiser has no idea what techniques the affiliate used to generate that sale. That's the whole problem.