October 13th, 2006
Is Zango stealing affiliate commissions from adult webmasters?
It seems that Zango, formerly known as 180solutions, the company we all love to hate, has royally ticked off a bunch of adult webmasters. Paperghost, aka Chris Boyd, has the story, complete with links to forums where the adult webmasters discuss Zango allegedly stealing affiliate commissions. True? I don’t know, but considering some of Zango/180solutions’ past questionable business practices, nothing would surprise me. Interestingly enough, Zango’s blog has a very recent post about cookies, claiming that “Zango does not read, alter, modify or delete Web site or cookie content.” and stating “Zango… do[es] not alter, manipulate, or delete third-party affiliate referral tracking information.”
In Boyd’s comments Dave Methvin of PCPitstop, explains what happens when affiliate cookies are overwritten and links to an article by Ben Edelman on “cookie stuffing”. Dave writes:
[...] here’s how it works. Someone goes to Zango and buys a keyword and/or URL to generate an ad. When an infested user goes to a site or page with the keywords, Zango generates a popup window with the “ad” in it. However, the ad is actually a redirect to a URL with a parameter indicating this is a referral from an affiliate–the affiliate that bought the ad from Zango! It overwrites any other affiliate tracking code that the site was using.
It hasn’t been that long ago that the CDT filed their complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about 180solutions and their practices. One would think Zango would be minding their Ps and Qs, but maybe not.
