
Bit.ly and Viglink Adding Affiliate Cookies on Shortened Links - moe
http://www.thesempost.com/bit-ly-viglink-quietly-adding-their-own-affiliate-cookies-on-shortened-links/
======
downandout
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-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ebay-the-fbi-shawn-hogan-and-brian-
dunning-2013-4?op=1)

[2] [http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate-
sentenced-5-mont...](http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate-
sentenced-5-months-prison-wire-fraud-82553)

~~~
eurleif
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.

~~~
downandout
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.

------
DanBlake
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...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
center/guidance/ftcs-revised-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking)

~~~
kposehn
> _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.

------
joshu
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](http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners)

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

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

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

------
davidu
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.

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

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-
insertin...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting-
stack-overflow-affiliate-into-all-amazon-book-links)

------
thisiswhy
Guess this explains how they became profitable
[https://medium.com/@markjosephson/why-profitability-
matters-...](https://medium.com/@markjosephson/why-profitability-
matters-62e9fc8427fc) , through shady tactics

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

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

So long, bit.ly

~~~
voltagex_
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...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_Broken)

URL shorteners are a terrible idea.

~~~
skuhn
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.

~~~
notfoss
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.

------
downandout
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.

~~~
jMyles
...but then why use bitly?

~~~
downandout
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 :)

~~~
eli
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.

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

------
ceejayoz
> 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](http://j.mp)
being treated as 22 characters).

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
See also: [http://qntm.org/twit](http://qntm.org/twit)

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

Heh.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Sam can be optimistic at times.

------
DigitalSea
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/](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.

~~~
chatmasta
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.

------
gotrythis
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](http://www.tracker.ly),
where you can create every type of redirect link in one place.

~~~
stephengillie
URL lengtheners are a good way to examine a URL before clicking. LongURL is my
favorite. [http://longurl.org/](http://longurl.org/)

------
jafingi
Stack Overflow does it too on Amazon-links etc.

------
RIMR
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.

~~~
stephengillie
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...](https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate-ebook-
site-140802/)

------
chatmasta
Isn't this cookie stuffing?

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

------
Rainymood
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.

------
wcummings
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.

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

~~~
ceejayoz
[http://powazek.com/posts/3229](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.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

