(Warning: rant below)
I happened to check my old site that I had set up a long time ago and pretty much forgot about it and found something really unpleasant. The site included multiple affiliate offer ads from all kinds of sources, including a few minor affiliate networks. For the record: these networks still exist.
When I saw my site it had no ads in some cases and ads replaced by other, often unrelated ads in the best case or even redirects to some stupid parked domains in the worst case. It really pissed me off and reminded me once more that if you want to keep control of your ads/images/whatever, better host them on your own server instead of hotlinking them from elsewhere. This is seriously an issue for affiliate programs and networks since very often they just give their affiliates a bit of code to insert into their sites which contains the link with their aff code and the image of the ad itself. Sometimes when I was lazy I was just pasting that code into my pages as well. Not any more!
But it’s not even this that pisses me off most of all. It’s the affiliate networks that list offers, provide ads images for them hosted on their server, have people put the code on their pages then at some point, even without discontinuing the offer, rehost the images or just remove them - WTF??? It’s one thing when I as affiliate put up sites, spam them till they’re banned, then replace them with new sites. I am a blackhat - I am kinda supposed to operate based on the short term tactics. But what kind of a fucked up tactic is this for an affiliate network? You get people advertising your offers - and you disrupt their efforts with your own hands? And what does it look like to the merchants counting on you for affiliate traffic? Not only do you fail to make money yourself as an affiliate network (unless you charge upfront and it’s non-refundable), you also do not let anyone in this scheme make money.
Unless you do it on purpose. You know, bait and switch kind of thing. Still, starting and promoting a whole affiliate network is kinda too expensive of an endeavor just for bait and switch - can be done much faster and cheaper and without the cost of losing all the merchants and affiliates. So, I guess, in this case it’s plain lame. Makes one want to stop working with you immediately.
Let me go change those lame ads to something more reliable now.
