Stumped About Stopping Spyware
By: Lisa Picarille
Affiliates are finding that spyware is stealing their cookies, their customers and their commissions. Tuan Le is mad. And when he's upset, he speaks quietly, deliberately and very thoughtfully. He's hardly a hothead. But nothing gets him more riled up, if you can call it that, than knowing he's losing a large percentage of revenue from his two affiliate Web sites to other affiliates that are acting in unethical and unfair ways.
Le, who's been an affiliate for the last few years and owns wholesaler.com and findcheapauctions. com, has spent a lot of time researching spyware and adware and has many times considered taking legal action against the companies that use spyware or somehow interfere with his affiliate commissions. But he's been reluctant to make waves.
"I think there is a percentage of what is supposed to be coming my way that is being diverted," he says. "I want to do something about it, but I'm not sure what I can do."
And Le isn't alone in this. Whether you call it spyware, adware, parasiteware or any of the many other names used to describe the software that positions itself between Web publishers and their merchant partners, the pernicious applications are causing thousands of affiliates to lose a lot of money.
According to an industry watcher who asked not to be named, affiliates are losing up to 40 percent of their annual revenue to illegitimate affiliates (often called bad actors) that entice end users to download free software in exchange for being served advertising.
Le estimates that figure could be as high as 50 percent.
"It's the most horrible thing on earth. It's intrusive, evasive and it's just a very nasty thing to do; and it's fast becoming one of the hottest ways to generate traffic on the Net," says Jason McClain, president and CEO of PrimeQ Solutions, an Internet marketer and lead generator.
Once loaded onto the user's desktop, these free applications often replace ads, redirect links and disable existing browser cookies. That means the ads that users see are not those paid for by affiliates – a consumer is often clicking on another affiliate's advertisement to make an online purchase or going to a competitor's site to buy goods. For affiliates that means a loss of commissions and traffic, which ends up hurting their revenue stream.
This issue has been a huge one for affiliates for more than the last four years, according to Kellie Stevens, president and founder of the affiliate marketing resource Web site AffiliateFairPlay.com.
"Affiliates feel the most pain – their cookies are being written over, the merchants are then paying out commissions that are not warranted. The merchants feel the second level of pain," says Gary Stein, a senior analyst for online advertising and marketing at JupiterResearch.
At the crux of the issue is, who owns the desktop, the browser or the application?
Those companies that derive the bulk of their revenue from selling advertising on free downloadable applications take the position that the user owns the desktop and that consumers have a right to decide for themselves what is displayed on their own computer screens, not publishers.
Thomas Storm, vice president for online services at VentureDirect Worldwide, a performance-based marketing firm, claims the desktop doesn't belong to a publisher, and if a user agrees to receive an ad, that is their choice. He acknowledges, however, that user agreement licenses for the free software are often so complex that few people actually read them. Or, if they do, few know exactly what they are agreeing to. Still, Storm believes it is the responsibility of users to make sure they understand what they've read before they agree.
"If there are three or four steps in the download process and users don't read through all of them, then that's their fault," he says. "You can't get away with claiming ignorance in a court of law. That won't fly."
A Big Problem
Although most market researchers who follow this space do not have specific numbers on the size of the spyware market or how much revenue is generated by the traffic, they agree the market is huge. Anecdotal evidence puts the spyware market at nearly $500 million, and some oft-quoted figures claim that nearly 90 percent of personal computers are infected with spyware or adware.
"It's very hard to get a sense of how big it is, but it is big, and the perceived impact is significant," says Stein, who notes that a quarter of the advertisers Jupiter surveyed are "philosophically opposed" to adware. Furthermore, 7 percent said their respective companies issued mandates prohibiting them from buying adware.
In October, EarthLink, along with anti-spyware and system utility software maker Webroot Software, published their SpyAudit Report, which scanned more than 1.1 million PCs for the period of July through September and found an average of 25 spyware-related applications running on each system. That is a slight decrease from the instances of adware and adware cookies, as well as a decrease in the number of system monitors and Trojan horse applications, on Internet surfers' systems for the period of January through March 2004, when the average was 26.5 percent.
This downturn was attributed to the increased awareness of spyware and adware infections and the increasing number of software tools available to fight the threat. Antivirus vendors, including Symantec and McAfee, have been adding some level of spyware and adware detection and removal tools to their software.
Defining The Problem
It's hard to fight something that is not defined. One of the biggest issues is one of the most basic – defining what is and isn't spyware. Spyware is a catchall term typically used to describe computer programs that are designed to stealthily install themselves on people's computers – often when the users attempt to download seemingly legitimate programs. The most benign spyware programs – also called adware – simply serve up a barrage of pop-up messages, while the most intrusive ones can track online movements, steal passwords and hijack sensitive data.
The fact that different groups use different terminology to describe these malicious programs (see sidebar) has made it difficult for various entities – especially the government – to curb the problem, according to Steve Messer, CEO of network service provider LinkShare. "Everyone's definition is different. There is not a definitive answer," Messer says. "Managing this problem will depend on how the community comes together."
There are a handful of companies that are most often named as perpetrators of these types of acts, including Claria (formerly Gator), WhenU and 180solutions. All say they are not spyware and are legitimate advertising networks (see page 44).
Still, many are upset at the practices employed by these and other firms.
"California and Utah have given Gator and WhenU a clean bill of health, spyspyware- wise. Continued on Page 2...
Tags:
shopping, spayware, commissions,
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