Bit.ly and Viglink Adding Affiliate Cookies on Shortened Links | Hacker News Reader

Bit.ly and Viglink Adding Affiliate Cookies on Shortened Links

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102 pointsmoe52 comments

This is right in the same vein as cookie stuffing, which Shawn Hogan went to prison for [1] [2]. Keep in mind that there is no "cookie stuffing" statute - he was charged with Wire Fraud - and using your position in the link chain to steal revenue from other affiliates seems to definitely fall under the definition of wire fraud. I can't imagine what lawyer told Bitly that this was a good idea given this precedent, but both they and Pinterest are doing it. I guess it's only illegal if you aren't a multi-billion dollar startup.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ebay-the-fbi-shawn-hogan-and-...

[2] http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate-sentenced-5-mont...

I don't think it's really the same. The cookie stuffing case was about generating affiliate revenue from people who never actually clicked on a link to eBay. This is just about making non-affiliate Amazon links into affiliate links.

Also, Bitly and Pinterest probably got approval from Amazon for this scheme. Shawn Hogan misled eBay about what he was doing.

We have no idea if they received approval or not, but IMO the conduct is very similar. I also can't imagine that Amazon would say "sure, divert revenue from our affiliates into your own pockets without telling them". That sounds like an idea that any affiliate program manager would vehemently object to.

Wow. I totally missed this. It's not a horrible deal... 5 months in prison for $10M or so. Still feels weird being criminally prosecuted for breaking a TOS.

Don't know about you, but for me there isn't any amount of money that's worth becoming a federal felon for getting.

Sure there is. The time might be hard to take, but if the price is right I'd celebrate the label. Of course many actions that would justify such a label are out of bounds on principle, but the label itself is irrelevant (the cash covers job effects, and other restrictions).

Becoming a felon by stealing money from the company that runs PayPal. I'd put that on my resume.

Horrible indeed. But sadly this is a common practice. Once I called out [1] the folks from Read It Later (now Pocket) for silently changing Amazon links. In their defense, at least they acknowledged and promptly "fixed" the API/policy in a couple of hours [2].

Another one that does the same is TabCloud Chrome Extension [3]. It scans all the tabs you saved, and stuff Amazon's affiliate links there. I fixed mine locally, but it's not a public license, so can't just fork and re-publish it.

[1] http://twitpic.com/4p9cpt

[2] https://goo.gl/YbYhTG

[3] https://goo.gl/OGdV3H

> to steal revenue from other affiliates

would it be legal(ish) if you left affiliate links intact, i.e. only adding your ID to links that aren't affiliate links already?

IANAL nor an affiliate marketing expert, but if I ran an affiliate program I would make that against the rules. It at least goes against the intent of the program, which is to reward/incentivize people who send you business. Everyone clicking these links was already going to your site, so bit.ly as an affiliate generates zero extra dollars in sales.

Stackexchange converts outbound amazon links to affiliate ones. (see https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-insertin...) Would that be the same?

Hey I'm just a guy. Maybe Amazon figures it's better to police affiliate links lightly or that a bit of a giveaway to SO isn't such a bad thing. If I ran an affiliate program I probably wouldn't allow that behavior.

> I guess it's only illegal if you aren't a multi-billion dollar startup.

Amazon owes me > $40k after terminating my affiliate account for doing something similar in principle.

Their reasoning was that they felt the traffic I was driving in their direction was already going to be theirs, and that I was just injecting my affiliate commission into the process...as such, I was stealing from them.

The real issue here is that bitly is doing these affiliate conversions without the FTC mandated disclosure¹. If I create a non-affliated link for a amazon product for a blog post and use bitly to shorten it and dont disclose it as a affiliated link (after all, I shortened a unaffiliated link), Someone is liable to be sued by the FTC.

IMO, Bitly may be putting every publisher at risk for legal action. Even though such legal action may never happen nor be likely, its still pretty shitty to do and as stated, illegal.

¹ https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

> _I’m an affiliate marketer with links to an online retailer on my website. When people click on those links and buy something from the retailer, I earn a commission. What do I have to disclose? Where should the disclosure be?_

> Let’s assume that you’re endorsing a product or service on your site and you have links to a company that pays you commissions on sales. If you disclose the relationship clearly and conspicuously on your site, readers can decide how much weight to give your endorsement. In some instances, where the link is embedded in the product review, a single disclosure may be adequate. When the product review has a clear and conspicuous disclosure of your relationship – and the reader can see both the product review and the link at the same time – readers have the information they need. If the product review and the link are separated, the reader may lose the connection.

> As for where to place a disclosure, the guiding principle is that it has to be clear and conspicuous. Putting disclosures in obscure places – for example, buried on an ABOUT US or GENERAL INFO page, behind a poorly labeled hyperlink or in a terms of service agreement – isn’t good enough. The average person who visits your site must be able to notice your disclosure, read it and understand it.

As seen in the text above, this doesn't quite apply. The person placing the link is presumably _not_ actively promoting the product for a commission. Bit.ly is the one converting it into a monetized link, and Bit.ly receives the commission split with VigLink.

This is a very important distinction here. The FTC is basing their guidelines on a person that is compensated for actively endorsing a product/service on their web site. This wouldn't qualify and as such looks to be a use case not considered previously. It is also no t that different than Pinterest doing the same with links on their site.

I called this in 2009. URL shorteners are the gift that keep on giving.

> We hope the shortener never decides to add interstitials or otherwise "monetize" the link with ads, but we have no guarantee.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

Its the easiest way to monetize them. I'm really surprised it took this long. One of the interesting things to look at is CTR and affiliate payout, you may find that only 30 - 40% of the affiliate links "stick" only because so many people between where the link is and the vendor end up trying to stomp on the affiliate tie in.

It is an affiliate eat affiliate world out there.

Sometimes I wonder if you are just a ramblebot that looks for keywords and finds a semi-relevant story.

Seeing that he is a member of the watson group at IBM, it just might be true ;)

This is a clear violation of the Amazon and eBay affiliate programs. These shortened URLs were already clicks being sent to Amazon or eBay (or whoever the affiliate is). No overt attempt at promoting a sale or purchase of a product is taking place.

We contemplated this kind of thing for about 2 milliseconds when OpenDNS had an ad revenue business and we couldn't ever wrap our heads around how it's even remotely acceptable behavior.

Is stackexchange also violating the terms by inserting affiliate links to amazon for outbound links?

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-insertin...

Guess this explains how they became profitable https://medium.com/@markjosephson/why-profitability-matters-... , through shady tactics

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime" --Balzac (after a fashion)

One does not anger one's users in a market where one is replaceable with zero effort.

So long, bit.ly

Let's just hope that when they do die, their link database is given to archive.org - http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_B...

URL shorteners are a terrible idea.

URL shorteners are a great idea, but for very limited use cases. I think they only make sense when run by a particular service for use with that service's URLs, like t.co or db.tt, and live and die in tandem with the underlying service.

General purpose URL shorteners are just time bombs waiting to go off. They'll die and break all of their captive URLs or they'll realize they need to make some money and do something like this (or much worse). There's no third option.

Well third party URL shortners can be useful when you are sharing the URL via SMS or an IM, i.e., just for a quick share.

You can still use Bitly, but have the bitly point to your own site first, then redirect to your affiliate link from there. With a bit of work you can do the same with any post you make to Pinterest, so that they don't hijack your affiliate links either.

...but then why use bitly?

Because its unlikely that you own a domain that short. They also own j.mp ...a 1 letter domain. Good luck getting one of those on your own :)

You could probably get a complete URL of equal or shorter length though because your new shortener domain could start counting from single-digit IDs again. Bit.ly is up to 7 characters.

There is v.gd, run by the is.gd people.

This was discovered months ago: https://www.schaafpc.com/bitly-viglink-publisher/

As @DanBlake had mentioned, there is a serious FTC issue where individuals that were casually linking to a merchant are now unwittingly becoming advertisers. There's a decent snippet in the comments of the above link about that.

They claim that they are just turning non-affiliate links into affiliate links.

They also claim they are not overwriting other affiliate links.

So do they automatically recognize all other affiliate network redirects? What about direct linking affiliate programs? What about Pay-Per-Call programs? There are a number of ways this can go wrong and take money from other affiliates by hijacking the links.

Not to mention the fact that there is very little benefit to the merchant here - that is traffic that quite clearly they were getting anyways. There is complete intent to link to them, so why must they pay VigLink and Bit.ly for shortening the URL? That's a service being used by the individual linking to the merchant. It's not worth commissioning on, there's very little value to the merchant.

If you have an affiliate program with Viglink, please contact them and request they remove ALL URL shorteners from their program - it's not just bit.ly, it's tinyurl as well, and a couple others that I cannot recall at the moment.

> However, to stay within the character limit constraints of the social media platforms, you use Bitly to shorten the URL.

Why are people still doing this? The only major platform with such limits is Twitter, but using a shortener no longer does anything - Twitter runs every link, bar none, through t.co and counts that URL length against you (which leads to fun situations like the 11 character link http://j.mp being treated as 22 characters).

See also: http://qntm.org/twit

"I expect it'll be rectified in a day or two..."

Heh.

Sam can be optimistic at times.

Quite interesting to see so many commenters claiming this is "cookie stuffing", this isn't cookie stuffing. Essentially non-affiliate links are being turned into affiliate links and quite a few people do this.

A couple weeks ago on Shark Tank Australia there was some lady trying to get funding for her website "Rich Gurl" (http://richgurl.com/) essentially what she does is goes out and scrapes sales from all of the major retailers, then when someone clicks a product and heads to that website a cookie is saved on your machine for a few weeks. Any purchased you might make in that window is counted as an affiliate sale and it is NOT illegal. This is essentially what Bit.ly are doing with their shortened links.

What Bit.ly are doing here is not illegal, it might be a bit deceptive but not illegal. The best course of action here would be for users of Bit.ly to stop using it and perhaps find an alternative. Eventually if enough people leave then Bit.ly might get the hint and stop what they are doing.

It's cookie stuffing because the visitor was already going to amazon before bitly appended their affiliate link. This is different than when an affiliate promotes a specific product and convinces the visitor to click a link with an affiliate code. Bitly did not convince anyone to buy a product.

It may not be cookie stuffing by strict definition, but it's definitely affiliate fraud and I cannot see how any advertiser would be happy to pay bitly for adding zero value.

don't get how she can make money just by scraping. I mean anyone can scrape. The problem would be generating traffic so enough people could click on the ads.

I'm confused as to what she was doing differently, amazon even offers product ad widgets to put on your page.

Back in 2008, the owners of digital point forums got sued by ebay for something similar, dropping cookies on people visiting their forums for amazon. I wonder if bit.ly will be sued for this.

Shameless plug: Check out http://www.tracker.ly, where you can create every type of redirect link in one place.

URL lengtheners are a good way to examine a URL before clicking. LongURL is my favorite. http://longurl.org/

Stack Overflow does it too on Amazon-links etc.

Easy way to get this fixed: Every time you buy something online, create a bit.ly link and follow it prior to purchasing. Flood retailers with bit.ly affiliated links until they refuse to pay bit.ly for their wire fraud.

They'll either get sued and/or the backlash will give them the hint to stop trying to be scammers.

Quick, someone make this a browser extension. We'll kill it the way we killed Amazon's ebook monopoly.

https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate-eb...

Isn't this cookie stuffing?

Did bit.ly partner with merchants who are aware of this practice?

Really really shady ... I was wondering how bit.ly was going to make some money. I never thought there was any business in link shortening.

Really shady stuff.

>Apparently Viglink said they would not be overwriting other affiliate links, however in the comments at Practical Ecommerce, it seems to indicate that it is happening in practice, and affiliates driving the links are not getting credit for doing so.

So basically bit.ly is cookie stuffing.

Rule #1 of the internet - if you're not a consumer and you're not paying for something, you're actually the product.

http://powazek.com/posts/3229

> We should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything, it excuses the behavior of bad companies, and it makes you sound kind of like a stoner looking at their hand for the first time.

Also, because its wrong. In the usual case, you are the supplier of the product, being paid for the supplied product with the "free" service, and recognize that -- rather than viewing yourself as the product -- is more useful because it frames what you should be evaluating: is what you are receiving for the product you are providing worth the cost to you of providing that product.

...but seriously - your hand is awesome.

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