Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: There's various different ways. Let's say you had sent someone to dell.com. They come back a week later to purchase, but in that time they had installed some software, that software went in there and automatically replaced all the cookies it found with it's own affiliate ID. And it just completely stole your affiliate commision. Now, a lot of this, you may look at this and say, oh well, it was free traffic that time, I guess that's the cost of business. Well, not necessarily, because what if you're doing pay-for-click? I mean, you paid for that traffic that someone else just... they literally stole that money from you. See? Literally to me, it is stealing. You know, as bad as it gets. And a lot of times people will come to me and say, "Well, I'm the manager, I'm going to have to pay that money out one way or another, why should I expend so much resources to tracking down spyware in my programs... you know, I'm going to end up paying that to the affiliate anyway so it's the affiliate's problem." I get that sometimes, and my first response to them is, hey, if that's your attitude, your program is not going to last. Because the word will get out. Affiliates find these spyware programs, and that's... that's why... if you surf around, these guys, they do it for a hobby. They go out and they find which companies are infested, and they make a big deal about it. And if you don't take care of it immediately, it's going to show. People are going to leave your program.

Anik: But let's look at why it affects your pocket, and the company, and the market. Let's say I'm a company, and I am doing pay-per-clicks to my own site. This has nothing to do with affiliates, I get qualified leads by paying for them, and, you know, no affiliate should ever be paid. But because that person who clicked that link, from my pay-per-click ad that came to my site, because they at one point or at some point installed spyware software on their computer, when they get to my site, it's going to input their cookies when there should be no cookies. There should be no affiliate in that, it's my sale. But I'm going to end up paying commission on that sale when I shouldn't have. Can you just, just take a second and imagine how much that affects your ROI. It's going to kill your ROI.