Affiliates Behaving Badly … Again
It is the love / hate relationship between affiliate manager and affiliate. Make money. Make me money, but don’t get in trouble. Need me to look the other way? Ok. I don’t mind appearing ignorant on occasion, but don’t end up making me look stupid. You may end up keeping some funds, but I won’t, and so the only one who really loses is me. It’s not to say the relationship is so explicit, but looking at past behavior, this is sort of what plays out at the cpa networks as affiliates and account managers look to find that equilibrium. It is a balancing act between risk and too much risk.
The line between the two gets crossed both inadvertently and deliberately. Affiliates behaving badly is not new. At times it feels as though it is being crossed more frequently. You might argue that it is being crossed more now than in prior years. Chances are we aren’t seeing more bad behavior just slightly more egregious behavior because it is harder today to make money than in years past. It is never easy to make money, but you will find people who did well years ago feeling thankful that they didn’t have to start today. Perhaps that difficulty is what drives the risks people take. Or, it could simply be the new cycle of youth looking for ways to make money that others haven’t. In any event, we came across a first for us – LinkedIn Spam.
There is something about a social network that opens itself up for spam, and last week we looked at some of the fraud taking place in order to drive sign-ups to incentivized offers. People’s accounts getting hacked, fake events and other attempts at getting into the news feed. We see such behavior less on a business network. There is something about the business network that has made it less susceptible to similar fraud, but it was only a matter of time before someone tried. Here is a message that many received in their inboxes:
The text is a dead giveaway. It doesn’t read anything like what you would expect from a business communication, because it’s not a business communication. It’s about a consumer destination. That is arguably the key mistake.
Clicking on the link in the message takes you to a straightforward landing page for auto insurance.
The most interesting thing is the monetization. Insurance has a few options that other verticals do not have. Here, entering the zip does two things. It launches a pop-up of the second step for one of the major lead aggregators in the space. The site also loads in CPC results from the vertical marketplace leader. It’s a setup familiar to quite a few who have run or tried to create auto insurance offers. The CPC’s from the vertical marketplace are quite high, and it lends itself towards thoughts of arbitrage. They’re not arbitraging anything here though.
A little digging reveals that this site doesn’t do a lot of traffic or volume. And, this is the type of trick that will get them quickly blacklisted. I do like the innovation in the approach, though. The message was sent by someone based in India listed as a consultant. They went and joined several groups with tens of thousands of members and then sent messages to members individually leveraging the shared group and most users default settings allowing for these messages. Luckily, for LinkedIn the economic reward is so low that we probably won’t see too much of this. And for the companies, so long as their lead buyers didn’t get the same message and see this site before they shut it down, they too will live to fight another scam.
