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Affiliates need cookies to get commissions, but users fear they are linked to spyware, and that's causing lots of angst on both sides.
Cookies will drive you nuts. As you know, cookies - or very small files that recognize you as uniquely you to particular websites - are kind of the backbone of affiliate marketing. If the cookie didn't exist, there would be no way for you to claim the sale or track your core customers. This would effectively kill affiliate sites in their tracks.
Or will it? Recent studies on cookies have only confused matters. Survey respondents have said they delete cookies off their hard drives as frequently as every week. JupiterResearch in April released its cookie study that said nearly 40 percent of those online trash cookies monthly. Burst Media weighed in with its findings, echoing Jupiter's study: 38 percent of online consumers nix their cookies once per month. Nielsen NetRatings pushed up the panic by stating that 43.7 percent of its respondents said they dumped cookies monthly. An InsightExpress survey said 56 percent. But then it backpedaled, saying probably fewer than that number actually delete cookies, citing data that when study participants were asked to immediately trash their cookies, only 35 percent did it correctly.
Even more baffling to the average user are the different kinds of cookies that exist: first-party cookies; third-party cookies; tracking cookies; local shared objects. It boggles. Even Walter Mossberg, a well-respected tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, came out strongly against tracking cookies and suggested they be classified as spyware. In the same breath he did admit that first-party cookies are what make the Web a fun, personalized experience.
Even so, the studies seem pretty grim. If the results are accurate, then nearly half your sales would be freebies - meaning that 50 percent of your commissions would also disappear.
But then in April, Atlas Institute released an analysis of some of those studies and concluded many simply weren't true. Atlas found that 40 percent of those who said they deleted their cookies monthly didn't do it when they said they did. Cookies were generally present twice as long as respondents stated on their surveys.
It wasn't a conspiracy. In many cases, it was just bad recall. In some instances, respondents assumed cookies were being deleted by anti-spyware products installed on their computers. Some of the deletion numbers are so high because users think the software is doing it for them. In many cases it isn't. This puts anti-spyware and anti-adware software makers in a strange position: is it their responsibility to help you manage your cookies, or is it just a whole lot of paranoia?
Of the most popular anti-spyware software, about 75 percent come with "cookie management" options. What that means varies from maker to maker. When most anti-spyware programs do their normal scans (daily, weekly, monthly or however the user sets it) they will catch cookies but rarely do anything about them. The default is to generally ignore them. If the program offers a check box to dump certain kinds of cookies on a regular schedule, it has to be turned on by the user. Most anti-spyware makers believe the majority of their users are going with default settings. In fact, some studies have said that the so-called "computer savvy" also keep cookies longer than they say and believe they are deleting them when they aren't.
All this misperception, in many ways, boils down to a few basic facts that most anti-spyware software makers can agree on: taken on their own, most cookies are not harmful. Cookies carry no code and so they cannot carry viruses. While cookies may carry information on where users have gone on the Web, most of it is anonymously tracked - meaning such data doesn't contain personal information. The Wall Street Journal's Mossberg wrote it was akin to a company knowing what channels you watched on TV without telling you it was monitoring you. Generally it's more like following a set of footprints in the sand to see where they go, but the tracker has no idea if the person making the prints is Jane Doe, Jane Doe's mom or Santa Claus.
One of the persistent problems, says Phil Owens, product director of CounterSpy, a product of Sunbelt Software, is that "most average users perceive that the program is doing the [cookie] removing" for them. He adds that most antispyware software makers are in a bit of quandary about cookies. They are "gray," Owens says, because they are not malicious. Therefore, you'd think it isn't software makers' responsibility to clean cookies. Owens says this is a tough call. "On the one hand, maybe we should play a role and tell people cookies are benign until proven wrong. We can help quell that concern. On the other hand, market pressure by consumers is great. They will say, 'This software found this but you didn't,' even if it is not malevolent."
"The general public doesn't understand the value proposition of the cookie," says Rick Carlson, president of Aluria Software, which makes Spyware Eliminator. That's why version 4.0 - released in February - has a whole separate tab in its scan results that lists the newest cookies. "Previous versions never detected cookies," Carlson says, "but we put it in because consumers wanted it. And they wanted to be able to detect and remove them." He says that sometimes spyware can place a cookie and that there is an outside chance that spyware reads other peoples cookies. Consumers wanted insurance for those remote possibilities, he says.
One of the most high-profile of antivirus software from McAfee currently doesn't do any cookie tracking or identification either in its McAfee AntiSpyware 1.1 or VirusScan 9.0. McAfee spokesman Hector Marinez says the programs do not delete cookies or recommend deletion of cookies. He adds that the upcoming McAfee AntiSpyware 2.0 will have a cookie tracking function where cookies are identified and the user can choose to delete them. VirusScan 10.0 will not have cookie tracking.
Currently, anti-virus and anti-spyware from Microsoft does not scan for cookies, in part because the remembered passwords and Web page settings in cookies help tailor the Internet experience for visitors of Microsoft properties such as MSN. To help boost commerce, it's been reported that the beta version of Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware does not disable tracking cookies. However, GIANT Company Software, the company that developed the anti-spyware product and was acquired by Microsoft in December, disabled tracking cookies.
Owens adds that he can conceive of a function in future versions of CounterSpy where the software scan can tell you exactly what each cookie is for, such as whether it was for a retail purchase you made or whether it was placed there by potential spyware.
Spyware Eliminator has its tabs even though Aluria's Carlson says he would probably have preferred to have Eliminator ignore cookies. Continued on Page 2...
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