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Here is a list of Ben Edelman’s results and a few of mine added. I don’t think this list is complete – I only watch like one or two days a month and had some places to add to Ben’s findings.
A couple of affs are advertising their own sites, so you can recognize them clearly, but there are others pushing casinos directly. In some cases it almost looks like a couple of affs have partnered with one specific program to target another to push it out of business. Nasty! Of course the hit program will try to fight back and it will get nastier yet. Who is laughing all the way to the bank? Whenu of course!
These are just whenu users. There are a ton of other scum companies. So don’t think this is all there is – it is very pervasive. It is likely costing all of us more than half of our income – but let’s wait for Ben’s next report before we judge.
Bingo Palace
Bingo Workz
Casino on Net
Colosseum Casino
Cyber Bingo
Jetset Poker
Ladie’s Bingo
Mummy’s Gold
Poker Room
Pacific Poker
Party Poker
Pigg’s Peak
SBG Global Sports
Platinum Play
30 top Casinos
Wild Jack
World Wide Vegas
Bingo Cafe
Bingo Hall
Bingo Fun House
Gaming Club
Golden Palace
Jackpot City
Lucky Nugget
Riverbelle
Bet365
Casino Prophet
Diamond Deal
Las Vegas USA
Poker World
Vegas Casino
Betfair
Game Account
Geisha Lounge
Get Minted
Gold Circle
King Solomon
Little Woods
Mega Spot Casino
Odds Checker
The Ritz
Ritz Bingo
Ritz Poker
Sky Bet Vegas
Zany Bingo
32 Red
Play Monte Carlo
Blackjack Ballroom
Sun Vegas
Inter Casino
Virtual CityA list of targeted places would also be very very interesting.
I am not saying your wrong, but is there any proof of this?
Proof that they use scum? Download the whenu application and surf the casinos. Go to aff sites and click on casinos.
Whenu will first learn what you like, then show you so many ads per day.
Is that the proof you were asking about?
Also, this is a list I took from Ben Edelman’s research and I fully trust it to be accurate – he has been at it for some time and I have watched all along.
Just exactly how much revenue we are losing is not clear, but may become clearer as ben continues his research.
Wow, Dominique (beautiful name by the way,) I am shocked!
I wonder how much they’ve stolen already from us 😡 Ben certainly does do xtensive research on this topic. I’m curious to see what else will come out.What can we do as portal webmasters to protect ourselves from this?
Very little.
In the past I had organized a boycott of casinos that use it. The trouble with that was that some of the users were also the better performers for many affiliates.
I used to watch carefully and approach each casino that was doing a trial and let them know affiliates did not like this. Most stopped after the trial run.
I was so opposed to this that last year I boycotted a convention in Montreal because they had invited gator to speak. This made me unpopular in some circles – but I acted my conscience. We organized an alternate event and it came off well.
Eventually the main scum company then, Gator, since called Claria and the sister company for whenu, agreed to remove popups from casino affiliate sites on request of the advertiser.
This brought some relief, and about that time I “made my exit” from GPWA and let the matter rest.
A year has passed.
The popups are not back, but the problem is the same now.If I go to your site and click on – let’s say SciFi – I will go on and suddenly find myself at – let’s say Piggs Peak.
Piggs Peak has popped on top of SCIFI. Scifi has your aff code, Piggs Peak paid whenu to steal that customer from you and Scifi.
This problem is becoming aggravated now with the “good venues” for advertising being unobtainable for us. Where do you think the lost PPC traffic went?
I am willing to bet most of it went to scum. Whenu is just one very visible company. There are dozens.
The larger affiliates have taken to using them also. I was recently talking to a manager who is losing money big time because apparently another program and two affiliates are targeting his casinos like crazy.
Despite my enormous disaste for this overt theft I had to tell him that I could not blame him for striking back at this point. What is he to do, lose most of his business but know we all love him? He has to defend himself.
In the last week I was contacted by 4 other concerned managers. This problem is taking off like crazy again.
It is so stupid, it’s like everyone is standing in a cricle shooting each other in the foot.
The only ones who are happy are the scum companies.
If no one bought their ads, everyone would make the same money most likely. And they wouldn’t have to pay ransom to scum. Everyone would be ahead.
But – what ‘ya gonna do?
I am waiting to see what Ben’s next piece on research digs up. He is working on the effect on affiliates.
He had a beautiful tool he had to deactivate because of his involvement in a legal case against gator – but you can still see cached results here:
http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/gator-sites/test.asp?host=www.casinotropez.com
Type casino names in and you’ll see who used to target them. The main culprits are usually still at it, with a considerable number added.
Does this mean that say I have Sci-Fi Casino on my site, people that click on there are instead taken to Piggs Peak, that Sci-Fi will show a click in their stats program, or not?
Just curious because it would make sense of some of my stats for different programs. I have a couple that show a lot of clicks, enough where you’d think eventually someone would download at least, and then one where there are tons of downloads and no players. I noticed on http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/gator-sites/test.asp?host=sci-fi-casino.com that some of the scum targeted specific pages -new user, deposit, etc. of the target casino, so if that is correct then maybe potential customers are getting through sometimes to different points of the site you are promoting and then redirected. This would affect the stats of those programs. I do not know, just guessing here and asking really.
Is there any way, other than using Whenu’s program to find out who is being targeted?
I misunderstood the post. I thought you meant these casinos were untrustworthy and stealing our commission.
My mistake
Dom
Your link above was for gator. Which to my understanding has stopped accepting gambling advertisement, I might be wrong but heard they were stopping the first of June. Also heard that possibly whenu will be stopping in August.I think you have to be realistic and accept it as part of business. If I could snap my fingers and make it go away, I would. But eventually you’ve got to come to terms with what is what and bend your future business plans to what is a fact of life.
The fact of the matter is – is that scumware is epidemic in proportion and almost every casual surfer now has some form of scumware on their PC.
Really, don’t take my word for it either. Go look on your neighbor’s PC, the one that just surfs the net for fun on occasion.
Especially anybody that has surfed porn. Things have really gotten out of hand but finding that to be true; and choosing to ignore the facts, is a great recipe for disaster when it comes to running a business.
You’ve got to play on a level playing field if you expect to be able to compete successfully.
Having said all that however, i’ve tried several scumware to advertise and have had terrible results every time.
I’m still trying them but I’ve yet to find one that I’ve wanted to invest money into a second time.
I dropped $2500 on ezula and didn’t see anything positve for my troubles. that one hurt.
other places of course was much less invested but I felt enough to have warranted something positive but not one time did that turn out to be the case.
frankly after my experiences I think that there is much less taken from us (by scumware) than I first thought.
And if that’s the case, and you still feel your bottom line is not what it should be; then I suggest looking at other possible leaks for that missing part of your profits.
lets see? who does that leave? It couldn’t be that the casinos were using this as yet another way of excusing poor bottom lines could it?
If anybody is brave enough, I’d be interested in hearing their experiences with ads on scumware.
Why should I accept someone stealing? I find that unacceptable.
A better name for it is thiefware.
You pay the company to steal for you.
I realize Gator is not accepting ads anymore from casinos, and the tool only offers old cached results anyway. It clearly states this. It is still a good example of how this works.
I did not know whenu was fixing to quit taking casino ads – good riddance. It has done considerable damage to some of the web’s most reputable casinos. I am delighted to hear this.
There will be dozens of thiefware outfits left.
F&p, scifi would show a click but of course nothing else. Your hard earned vositor is stolen right after he clicks. This is a big part of why so many programs show so many clicks these days with no conversions.
I am not alone at all with the opinion that this is totally unethical – these companies are constantly in court and get many legal judgements against them. But because of advertisers who do not care that they are stealing from those who cannot afford to spend that sort of money, they continue to have enough revenue to fight the law. Some of the best and most affiliate friendly casinos are being hit the hardest. They are ethical and refuse to use such methods – and suffer.
Every general affiliate community has this as a topic for some time now.
If you think that the disappearance of whenu from our industry will put a stop to this – think again.
Try typing thiefware, spyware, adware etc in a search engine and do some research. There are lots of different types of thiefware. They are all booming. They are stealing us all blind.
When I dealt with this a year ago, I encouraged casinos to refrain from using thiefware and promised that affiliates would then prefer them.
Meanwhile things have gotten so out of hand that I cannot in good conscience ask them this – they are sacrificial lambs then.
What do you all think can be done about this? We need to stick our heads together and think about how to handle this. It seems that thiefware will rule – as one of the few advertising vehicles left to the industry.
Should we really all stand in a circle and shoot each other in the foot? And pay someone outrageous prices for the privilege to do so?
I think it kind of depends on how important affiliate traffic is viewed by the casinos. If it is viewed as a possible substantial loss, and you got enough affiliates to go along with not promoting the casinos that use this, that might have an effect.
The problem then is getting enough affiliates to do this to cancel out some of the bigger ones that will continue to do so. It’s hard really to blame some affiliates and/or casinos for using it when they’ve lost business in the past and figure join them instead of being beat by them. Standing in a circle, shooting each other in the foot describes it well though.
Since there appears to be no regulation or organized fight against this, the best thing is to do what you’re doing now. Get information out. I had never heard of this until reading this thread. As a result, I’m not going to continue to promote casinos that steal my other customers. If they’re willing to pay out the money to do this then I have no doubt they are cheating in other ways.
The only other possible solution is a technical one. I don’t know if it can be done but if the casinos could develop something to halt redirects from their site then that would solve this too. The scumware people are able redirect our casinos’ traffic, why couldn’t the casinos themselves come up with something to redirect the thief’s ads right back? You know how sometimes you go to a site and you can’t hit you’re back button-it kind of traps you on the site? Something like that.
Thanks for the information. Anybody got a list of programs that don’t use this stuff?
No, there is no such list. You may assume that those not listed as using whenu don’t do so – but like I said, there are dozens of other thiefware programs and all of them are used by some industry members. Also, it is largely up to the casino and not the aff program – so you will find programs where some casinos use it and some don’t.
Gator and whenu were the most profitable ones and their refusal to take anymore ads will get people looking at the smaller ones.
There are some that will, for instance, highlight the word BLACKJACK every time it appears on your website. If the visitor clicks on what looks like a link (not your link, just plain text for you) they will go to, for instance, Blackjack Ballroom.
Others will pop search results at search engines – so it interferes with the results from PPC traffic and SEO traffic also.
I have not really studied this in a year, and much has happened.
For instance, there are PPCs working with thiefware as an affiliate – the thiefware takes the top listings and pops them on search engines. Then they get paid for the clicks.
All kinds of business models out there now. It would be good to have a list of these and how they function, but I doubt we will ever have a complete list of all who use them.
there are PPCs working with thiefware as an affiliate
exactly. I am getting , or should say was getting traffic from gator and still do get it from hotbar all thru paying findwhat for the privledge.
why should i pay fw $2 a click when I can buy it in volume for pennies on the dollar straight from the thief’s mouth, so to speak.
as for what should be done, well we tried all that boycotting, etc, and despite what I thought was an admirable effort by those that participated, it comes down to the fact that the scumware is winning.
I mean everybody I know that is even a little less knowledgeable than I am, has it on their PC and don’t know how to get rid of it.
and I take it off for them, they’ll have it back on there the next time I check it out.
Its here and you might as well deal with it and move on.
that said, a couple of things I have started doing to counter-act scumware is to put a warning on all my sites (or most of them anyway)
and I use frontpage so I put the warning on the top shared border telling people not to click on pop ups, and I make sure to try and have a link (going somewhere, sometimes its to the page its on) for any words that I thihk might be
. important to the subject at hand – if your subject is “the fortunate rock casino then make sure all references to such are already linked with your links, because I remember reading that some scumware will turn your text that IS NOT linked into their links, but won’t cover links that are already there. mistakenly clicked on by surfers – it might be just the words click here but if you’ve left them open….
to be (more) sure, I always try to include as much of the sentence into the link as is needed to be sure to get the whole jist of the keyword covered. I guess a better example would have been that if you had in text : fortunate rock online casino – and you only linked the words fortunate rock; then it leaves open for scumware the keyword online casino. The surfer could click on it instead of fortunate rock – thinking its the same link; and end up somewhere else and follow the link from that site.
I can’t say how effective these methods are; but how effective do they need be, if like I said earlier, if the poor results that I have seen are more the norm than not; then it shouldn’t take much extra effort to avoid becoming seriously impacted by scumware.
and I’ve talked to some aff managers who will remain anon but they also told me that they didn’t get good results with scumware.
I get good results from decent PPC traffic so I don’t see why I wouldn’t with scumware except for one reason, the people are onto the jig and they’re pissed about it. therefore they aren’t going thru with conversions, perhaps visiting to type in the address later, for all I know.
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