I’ll be speaking at Affiliate Summit West on the Monday 2 PM Panel: Affiliate Program Compliance: Working with the Networks. My co-panelists include Rachel Corcoran, Director of Compliance at Hydra, Graham MacRobie, CEO of Alias Encore and Jamie Birch, CEO of JEBCommerce.
Stop by and say hi!

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We recently discovered a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Bit.ly that is being used by affiliates to insert affiliate links into bit.ly accounts.
A quick primer on CSRF attacks (from wikipedia):

The attack works by including a link or script in a page that accesses a site to which the user is known (or is [...]

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As PoachMark has grown, we’ve added detection for the affiliate networks our customers were utilizing. We’ve just recently added our fiftieth affiliate network. A few of the recently added networks include: ClickBooth, FlexOffers, CommissionSoup and CX Digital.
If you see a network that we currently don’t monitor that would be helpful to you or [...]

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Commission Junction provides merchants the ability to offer encrypted affiliate links. These encrypted links usually look something like this:

http://www.tkqlhce.com/b274nmvsmu9CBGFJEC9BADHIEHC

PoachMark frequently finds affiliates utilizing encrypted links in their search redirects. PoachMark is now able to decrypt the encrypted affiliate link to show its original form:

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2165942-10572459

This saves merchants substantial time and improves PoachMark customers’ visibility [...]

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Techcrunch has a series of scathing articles about the CPA offer spam found in Facebook games. I don’t expect that this is a surprise for many in the CPA world, but they are a must read for any program offering CPA offers and wondering about the quality of their CPA payouts:
How to spam Facebook [...]

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Geno Prussakov has a great post on the AM Navigator blog about how recent changes to Google Suggest can help prevent trademark poaching.
The screenshot below demonstrates a new way to bring up advertisements using Google Suggest:

While Geno’s point is that:
From the above image, it is obvious that Google Suggest puts the original website on the [...]

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Techcrunch has a good article on the latest conundrum facing affiliate managers: Izea (formerly PayPerPost) has begun introducing affiliate links to its network of sponsored bloggers.
While bloggers inserting affiliate links into their posts is nothing new (and not even necessarily bad), this particular incident is troubling for brand owners. The FTC has become increasingly [...]

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We’re excited to announce that PoachMark has officially launched. With over 200 affiliate programs monitored, we’re confident that PoachMark meets the robustness standards that we’ve established internally for this milestone.
PoachMark is now monitoring the affiliate programs of top 5 e-commerce merchants and top 5 Internet advertisers along with niche online retailers. We think Stephen [...]

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Amazon sent an email to all its affiliates this morning announcing a change in its paid search policy for affiliates – Affiliates will no longer be allowed to direct link to Amazon.
The issue of whether search affiliates add to the bottom line is a hotly debated one in affiliate marketing. In our opinion, the [...]

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I’ll be out at Affiliate Summit Sun-Tues. If you are interested in meeting up, send me a note (http://www.brandverity.com/contact/) or twitter @brandverity

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