Looks like there is a new sheriff in town affiliates using spyware and cookie stuffing. His name is Ben Edleman. Ben is a student at Harvard University and Harvard Law School and his current research agenda includes analyzing methods and effects of spyware and uncovering affiliate commission fraud.

Ben has posted an interesting explanation of Cookie Stuffing where he outlines who benefits and why networks, who profit from the practice indirectly, may be less than financially motivated to put an end to it. Ben has also "called out" some affiliates by listing their sites, and showing exactly how they are performing the cookie stuffing.

When you look at how some of these affiliates are attempting to hide the practice, you can't help but think, wow some of these guys are really smart. I was especially impressed with asmartcoupon.com's method of referencing an affiliate link as a 1x1 image call.

Let me start by saying that I am no saint. I toyed around with some iframes in my early days. I don't do it anymore, but let me explain why I went down that road in the first place, it certainly wasn’t in an attempt to “cheat” anyone. My feeling was that I put a lot of time into building a site, and was paying on a per-click basis to have the person come see and learn about the specific merchant, if I did an effective job pre-selling the customer, I should be paid for the duration of the cookie period, regardless if the customer clicked through at that very moment or logged off and then went directly back to the merchant's site and bought the next day.

Merchants benefit from affiliate sales activity without paying the affiliates all the time. In the travel industry they say that the number of transactions that start online and get completed via the telephone is 5 times the number that start online and complete online. Typically merchants don't have the technology to track back phone sales to affiliates, so affiliates lose out on sales they had a direct part of creating.

At Network Solutions, they extended the affiliate cookie period from 1 day to 7 days for affiliates, and quickly dropped it down to 3 days because they felt they were paying out too much for the sales. At the same time they track their own PPC activities out to 30 days and beyond for internal reporting purposes. As an affiliate I was happy to be getting 3 instead of 1, but know that the merchant continued to benefit from my sales activities long after they stop compensating me.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about not making enough money from my partners. I think it only works when you are able to create win-win partnerships. And when it comes to issues like “cookie-stuffing” today, or other issues that come up in the future, it is important to look at the issues from all angles.

Perhaps affiliates should be compensated for pre-selling a customer who comes back and buys later. Isn't that the whole point of the cookie time period? Maybe setting a cookie when the initial ad is displayed form the network should be an option that merchants can enable or disable in their program?

What are your thoughts?