I'll be speaking at SMX West Thursday on the panel:
On Tuesday, US Federal authorities filed criminal charges against Christopher Kennedy, a developer of cookie stuffing software. While the developer claims to have never engaged in cookie stuffing for his own benefit, he is being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. These charges carry a maximum fine of $250K and 5 years in prison.
I'll be speaking at Affiliate Summit West on the Monday 2 PM Panel: Affiliate Program Compliance: Working with the Networks. My co-panelists include Rachel Corcoran, Director of Compliance at Hydra, Graham MacRobie, CEO of Alias Encore and Jamie Birch, CEO of JEBCommerce.
Marc Bitanga recently created a flowchart for Google's Adwords Trademark policy. Although the flowchart doesn't address affiliates, shopping engines, etc. it does do a great job of visualizing many of the common trademark complaint cases.
This morning we publicly announced the Affiliate Watchlist. The Affiliate Watchlist has been available within PoachMark for a while, and now we're finally comfortable with the breadth and depth of information available.
We recently discovered a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Bit.ly that is being used by affiliates to insert affiliate links into bit.ly accounts.
As PoachMark has grown, we've added detection for the affiliate networks our customers were utilizing. We've just recently added our fiftieth affiliate network. A few of the recently added networks include: ClickBooth, FlexOffers, CommissionSoup and CX Digital.
Commission Junction provides merchants the ability to offer encrypted affiliate links. These encrypted links usually look something like this:
http://www.tkqlhce.com/b274nmvsmu9CBGFJEC9BADHIEHC
Techcrunch has a series of scathing articles about the CPA offer spam found in Facebook games. I don't expect that this is a surprise for many in the CPA world, but they are a must read for any program offering CPA offers and wondering about the quality of their CPA payouts:
