This morning we publicly announced the Affiliate Watchlist. The Affiliate Watchlist has been available within PoachMark for a while, and now we’re finally comfortable with the breadth and depth of information available.
The list consists of the IDs of affiliates that we’ve found to consistently violate merchant PPC policies. In many cases they’ve [...]

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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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