I just want to thank several people in the affiliate community for taking the lead in alerting others about bad affiliate behavior and also for taking the necessary steps to help halt the offending actions.

Thursday afternoon affiliate consultant Shawn Collins was kind enough to instant message me about some shady behavior. He alerted me to the fact that ReturnOnAffiliate.com, an upstart social networking site for affiliates, was using MyGeek.com to serve ReturnonAffiliate pop-ups to visitors of a variety of websites including Collin’s AffiliateSummit.com and RevenueToday.com.

Collins informed me that he contacted the site’s founder Richard Lewis by email and requested that this activity cease immediately. He also noted that this type of inappropriate behavior “could easily give your site a big black eye.”

I told the appropriate folks here at Revenue what had transpired and they immediately began an investigation into the situation. But before we could even make a call to Lewis or hit the send button on the email, I heard back from Collins.

He let me know that within several hours of receiving an email from him, Lewis responded with an email apology and noted that he was alerted by some upset ROA members and had “suspended the account with MyGeek” and was “not aware exactly how they were generating traffic to ReturnOnAffiliate.com through there [sic] model.”

Bright and early Friday morning I also received an email from Kellie Stevens, the president of AffiliateFairPlay.com. Stevens sent the mass email to a group of people impacted by recent actions of ReturnOnAffiliate.com, including ReveNews.com,, AMSWO, ABestWeb.com, eComXpo, ShareASale.com, Commission Junction, Share Results, IncentaClick, AffiliateBoards.com, Performics, BeFree, CPA Empire, and LinkShare.

Stevens is the person who first let Collins know about the problem. She discovered it while doing some spyware testing.

The email from Stevens reads, “The ads were being run through MyGeek.com with targeting of URL’s of ROA to pop on. For those who may not be familiar with MyGeek, they are an ad network where you can set up ad campaigns similar to AdWords. They have two types of ads available: CPC and CPV (cost per view). The CPV ads are specific to be farmed out to numerous adware companies for ad popping. Basically it’s like having an account with 180solutions only your ads are delivered through numerous adware applications. Richard was running CPV campaigns. I’m sending this because your web site was one of the sites being targeted for the ReturnOnAffiliate website to pop on. That’s the bad news.”

The good news, she says, is that she also contacted Lewis and that he responded within hours. He admitted he was wrong and turned off the account. Stevens says that she has verified that the “account is indeed turned off at this time.”

What is particularly troubling to many involved, including Revenue, is that those targeted have been participating as active members of the ROA community and leaders in the industry. Not people that you want to tick off. Stevens, Collins and a legion of others will now be watching ROA extra closely.

Stevens also offered up a tip you can use to see if you are being targeted by someone through MyGeek for pop ups.

“Go to www.mygeek.com. Under the “Advertisers” section in center screen, click the link to AdOnNetwork. Make sure any popup blockers you may have are turned off. In the search box at the top of the page, type in any keyword or domain name (ie yourdomain.com) and do a search. You don’t have to be logged in to do this. If you receive a pop up, then that ad is being run through adware. If you receive an ad listing on the search return Web page itself, those are CPC ads which are provided for placement on actual web pages.”

I’m thankful that this industry has people that will take time out to inform, alert and educate people when inappropriate actions occur. lisap@revenuetoday.com