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Zango Under Fire From Adult Webmasters
An anonymous reader writes, "Over the past few days, adult webmasters have been accusing adware maker Zango of 'stealing sales' by means of the following method: Computer users with Zango's adware on board will pop open a window containing the affiliate merchant's site they happen to be on at the time, except with Zango's own affiliate code in the window. By doing this, Zango claims credit for the sale and the original, rule-following merchant, the one who referred the user there, loses out. Despite this practice having been around since at least 2004, it seems the adult webmasters are only just realizing this takes place — surprising, considering how deeply connected the worlds of adware and porn are. It seems pornographers pushing adware is acceptable only as long as they aren't the ones getting burnt. Part of me doesn't care, and part of me hopes they carry the financial clout to force Zango to change their current practices."
Good thing there's no bias in this summary.
Selling adult material of willing participants to adults who want it.. definitely the same as theft.
...that all pornographers are inherintly contriving assholes? That, just because they have a different sense of morality, they would all stoop to such a low level? Sure, if they purely interested in "increasing shareholder value," then I can understand that they would, but could there not be suppliers of pornography who care about public reccomendation/honour/honesty?
I have freaks! I did something right...
Hello. Look at my site name to get some idea of my credibility.
First, this issue has been around since long before 2004. The tidbit that the OP seized on to write this remarkably clueless post is about Zango in particular, not the practice in general. Hello? Adult innovated affiliate programs, and is still far ahead of mainstream when it comes to combating fraud. Affiliate code rewriting is a huge issue, not just for adult, but for companies like Amazon (who Zango also targets).
Second, the idiotic "pornographers like adware except when it hurts them" is, well, idiotic. It's like saying "programmers write viruses but also complain about them; what hypocrites!" The fact is, there are tens of thousands of adult businesses on the internet, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Some of 'em (both businesses and people) are unethical. That doesn't make the rest of us hypocritical for disliking unethical business practices, nor does it in any way diminish the injury that legit businesses suffer from scammers.
It's easy to pick on the adult industry. There *are* scammers, spammers, and other losers who give the industry a bad name -- just like there are unethical stockbrokers, lawyers, programmers, doctors, etc. Plus, people are just uncomfortable with sex, which makes it that much more tempting to go on the attack rather than be seen as "soft on porn" (har).
But please, the takeway from this OP should be "when people have an ax to grind and don't care much about facts, legitimate issues come out seriously twisted."
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
posting anon , but i have heard (via Islamic websites as iam a researcher) that quite a few (more than 5) fundamentalist groups are using Zango to gain revenue for their causes, in fact its so widespread on middle east forums and sites iam sure this hasnt come to the attention of DHS faster, a browse through Zangos financial records and logs would reveal some interesting locations for payments and business relationships.
That threw me in a loop for a bit until I realized you meant "Adult sites" webmasters.
I mean, come on, it sounded like all those under 18 webmasters caught on early and us clueless adults as usual are two years too late to the party.
Hootie and the Blowfish's still cool, right? Or where they ever? Is it cool to say cool? Where did I put my Ace of Base CD?
No sig
I guess the child webmasters don't care.
Don't be stupid. They lose money on a legitimate referral because Zango is STEALING it. Who cares what type of business it is.
A malware company vs a web industry that generally loads its pages with popups and uses deceptive linking/indexing techniques. Come on, do we HAVE to root for one of them to win?
Where were you when the voynix came?
A lot of sites make thier money from persuading you to click links to commercial sites where you might buy something. Just because the links are coming from "illmoral" sites, does it make it acceptable to "hijack" thier referals?
Ben Edelman here. I wrote the piece cited in the original post.
These Zango practices target all affiliate merchants, not just adult web sites. Earlier this morning I happened to see Match.com (a mainstream dating site) facing commission theft by Zango and a Zango advertiser. I document this kind of problem on an ongoing basis, and it remains remarkably widespread, even 2+ years after I first wrote about it.
I'm not here to criticize the adult industry or to defend it. But Zango's practices should rise or fall on their own merits. In my view, this is a scam -- asking a merchant to pay a commission to Zango or a Zango advertiser, when the user had already, independently reached the merchant's site. Much as some folks may not like adult sites, they ought not be defrauded by spyware or spyware-using affiliates.
It continually impresses me how advanced the system administrators for adult sites are. The continually push the boundaries of streaming video, audio, bandwidth, efficiency, and security. I don't know if I should be surprised or not, but the selling of sex seems to drive technology like nothing else.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
An exceptionally small number, these days. For the most part, the sex workers who perform in adult films and photo spreads are well paid, and their employment information well documented. As the prudes and "Moral Majority" types try to push their puritan views on the rest of society, the Adult Entertainment Industry has responded by insuring their books are above board and in order so that closed minded people who want to push their morality views on everyone else can not use these things to shut them down. Porn is a zillion dollar business because upstanding citizens from every "walk of life" spend money on porn, this kind of cash doesn't come from dirt bags, you know.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seems like the person who wrote this article completely missed the point of what he/she was reading.. The recent furor isnt over "adware" or even "zango" , its about companies selling out their affiliates to these companies..
... ( birds chriping ) because porn is bad mkay...
Adware and popups have been around forever , neither of them focus soley on adult or mainstream.
example.. see the ad on top of this page.. zango overwrites it so you dont get paid.. i.e. you make less money.. your ads are served by adbrite.. how would you feel if you found out adbrite was paying someone else to cut you out.. ? Thats what this is about..
But i suppose this is ok with you because ? umm
You calim the adult industry is just learning about this , and now solving it.. whereas you have known about it the whole time and still arent doing anything to stop it.
Maybe your just a bit jealous the adult industry is doing something instead of being apathetic and letting yourself be abused
Did you even read the GP's post? The point you utterly failed to grap is that sweeping accusations like "The site owners (the porn sites) make it easier to attack them as they support spam.[snip]" are wrong. Believe it or not, most adult site owners out there don't "support spam"--there just happens to be a EXTREMELY prolific minority. And even if the majority did support spam, that doesn't excuse blanket accusations that demonize the entire porn industry.
Grab your dick and double-click for Porn, Porn, Porn!
... that every site you find that claims to have voyeur style videos (with the subjects not knowing they are on camera) are fake.
Fake. Fake. Fake.
Do you know how much legal liability there is if you try to make money off of something where the subjects are unwilling participants? Not enough to be worth the effort to set up a billing system and charge people access, I assure you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
freaking! I'm in Germany right now..
on my host families computer
and they have this Zango snot on their comp
I mean... I took a tid-bit of a look at it to see what it was... but I can't understand German that well so I didn't know what it said
but I kinda got the idea that it was some pretty shifty stuff when it started popping up IE windows of disgust and ads
now i know it's crap!
I'm going to try and explain this article to my host family and get to the bottom of why this scheiße is on this machine!
Rock on
~Ryan
It's called cookie stuffing and .. if they want to stop it they can like... not pay Zengo or whatever the russian scumware company is.
I worte elaborate affilite tracking software a few years ago and we had to deal with this... a more elaborate solution would be to keep a session with an image to pick off the IP to host relationship..
Look at the title and date of the comment above parent, titled "Adult" webmasters and dated Saturday October 14, @05:04PM, posted by user "secolactico". It is curious that the time of the parent is also Adult webmasters, and it just happens to have been posted the same exact minute as the previous post. Coincidence?
Great proof there retard.
1. The big secret is that most internet traffic is porn,
....)
and
2. Most malware is hosted on porn sites
so probably the porn sites should have all the leverage needed with companies like Zango (and Cisco and
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
so if some poor schmuck's computer is infected with the Zango adware, when they go to certain pages that have annoying popup banners, zango hijacks the url request to the banner site and injects its own "affiliate code" ("pay THIS spammer for that popup" code), so instead of the web page owner getting paid to spam you, Zango gets paid for the spam.
I don't see how this affects the owner of the computer. I also don't see how this can be illegal. However, I can see how this may violate the contract terms that Zango has with the banner sites that are cutting the checks.
Keep in mind though, the banner sites have already gotten their "impression" so they have their goods. The only thing they can really do about this is to slap Zango on the hand and pay the impression count money to the web page owner where it was intended. So, does Zango really hurt the banner site? They got their impression remember, they have their goods, it's just a matter of who gets the coin for it. Seems like more of a headache for the banner sites to muck with it, it's not like the web admins that use the banners are likely to abandon them, though no doubt they are sore about losing maybe 30% of their ad revenue.
So unless a lot of web sites go away from using the Zango-targetted ads and force the banner sites to bar the practice, I don't see any motivation for them to force Zango to do jack. Though the web page owners will no doubt do a great deal of whining.
Know what I say to them? (the spammers/banner whores) "waaaah!"
let them kill each other.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That's chilling material you're linking to. An excerpt for those who are link-shy:
Sadistic Sexual Fantasies
Since we're talking about the mind, what is your definition of sexual fantasy?
I think sexual fantasy is nothing more than the mental imagery of a desired event. You conjure up in your mind something you want to do. Fortunately for society, most of us do not act on those fantasies. Yet some do, with horrendous results.
In your work, have you come across a sexual fantasy that really surprised you?
Yes, many times. This goes back to the idea that there are no absolutes, the infinity of darkness. One such case involved a gynecologist who made a videotape of himself interacting with a prostitute. This videotape was destroyed by the investigative agency after I had been permitted to view it. The doctor hired the prostitute and gave her a gynecological examination. He then asked her to lie perfectly still as though she were a corpse and he had vaginal intercourse with her.
Following that, he murdered her and raped her corpse. He then removed her breasts and put them on himself. He decapitated her, removed her arms and legs and raped the torso. The video ended, but it is known that he disposed of the body and left the area. Unexplainably, he sent the videotape to a reputable associate who turned it into the police. The police linked this crime to other murders and moved to extradite the doctor. He was arrested and, on the day the police arrived, he committed suicide.
There are several questions, some of which I feel comfortable in addressing but won't here for lack of time:
1. Why did he pay a prostitute to submit to a gynecological examination when he is paid every day to do the same thing?
2. Why did he ask her to lie perfectly still during sex when he knew he was going to have her dead body to act on in a few minutes?
3. Why did he amputate her breasts and wear them?
4. Why did he amputate her limbs and have sex with her torso.
5. Why did he decapitate her?
6. Why did he make the videotape?
7. Why did he send the videotape to a reputable associate?
8. Why did he allow himself to be arrested?
9. Why did he then kill himself?
Ah, the infinity of darkness!
What are the components of an offender's fantasy?
First of all, there are two broad categories of sexual offenders. In Dark Dreams, I call them the "Impulsive" offender and the "Ritualistic" offender. This is somewhat similar to the concept of "Organized" and "Disorganized" killers that John Douglas and I originated way back in 1980.
The Impulsive offender is the most common sexual offender and the least successful in evading detection. His fantasies are two dimensional and simplistic: Victim Demographics and Self Perception.
The Ritualistic offender is the least common, but most successful in evading detection. These men have very rich, complex, and interactive fantasies. Their fantasies consist of five dimensions: Victim Demographics, Relational, Paraphilic, Situational, and Self Perception. The book goes into much more detail on this topic.
You stress the fact that a sexual sadist is a very particular type of offender and that other types of criminals are often confused with being a sexual sadist. What is a sexual sadist?
A sexual sadist is an individual who is aroused by the suffering of another. It is not the infliction of pain that is arousing to the sadist, but the victim's suffering. The sadist may use physical or psychological pain as a tool to elicit the suffering, but it is the suffering that is crucial to his arousal.
Several behaviors are confused with sexual sadism. One of the most common is cruelty during crime. Sexual crimes, by their nature, are cruel and sometimes the victims are beaten or murdered.
If they didn't support spam, why do they keep the money generated from spammers that they cancelled?
If they didn't support spam, why don't they display the spammer's information on a page that shows that the spammer had been terminated?
If they didn't support spam, why don't they put a simple link on the landing page which displays the verified affiliate information?
I had a web site owner that I sued, having the same affiliate with two different accounts. Of couse they settled, so I didn't get the ask the next logical question.
Fight Spammers!
I would trust an adult website with my money over paypal.
;)
I had a subscription to an adult site and I didn't cancel the subscription 14 days before the renewal as I should, so my subscription was automaticly renewed and I even used it a few days of that month until I wrote them an e-mail cancelling my subscription. They said okay we will transfer back your money, and I had my money back the very next day. I didn't have to fight over my money. They just said; "Ok, anything else we can do for you?".
The porn industry is very serviceminded if you know what I mean
I think it was ICRA who did the transactions.
LOL, this is the funniest thing I've read in a week, good stuff :D
Won't someone *please* think of the adults???
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"iam a researcher"
What are you researching? How to Write So That You Seem Somewhat Comprehensible?
Verbal diarrhea is remarkably like the real thing: it splatters uncontrollably in all directions and leaves a nasty smell. Let's start by referring to Zango and the like by some name other than adware. ICQ is adware and no-one, whatever their role in internet commerce, can reasonably take exception to "free" anything which puts a simple promo in front of its users, which they are free to ignore. Scumware functions quite differently: a surfer attempts to visit a site and another site is popped over his intended destination. For the surfer that is as bad, but admittedly no worse, than how he is treated by many sites - adult and mainstream. It is in effect a console. But from a commercial point of view, there is no similarity at all. Firstly because a webmaster who has chosen to keep his site free of such tricks, is helpless to prevent his visitors being exposed to them anyway. Secondly because he has no financial interest in these consoles and they - to all practical intents and purposes - "steal" a percentage of his sales. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to be smug about this, because mainstream sites are every bit as vulnerable as are adult sites. I have worked in online adult for more than 10 years. Yes the industry has many people who came from flipping hamburgers and will return to flipping hamburgers. That is pretty much inevitable, since a lot of people still believe it is a route to instant riches. There are many who owe their success entirely to timing and have wasted years bragging about their new cars and houses, rather than learning anything about business. Another inevitability in view of the gold-rush which was online porn during the mid-to-late 90's. And unfortunately some of these people built up big companies which still have a significant presence. In short, even without getting into the material that adult webmasters handle, the industry as a whole is indeed wide open to criticism. But it is a myth that mainstream internet commerce occupies higher ground. Replicated content, viruses, consoles, SE spammers, you name it. If it exists in adult online, it exists in mainstream. As to the charge that we only just got around to noticing Zango and their ilk, that is simply nonsense: the current interest is just the latest skirmish between the white hats and the black hats. Unfortunately the good guys aren't any more likely to win this time than on previous occasions, but this is a process every industry apparently has to put itself until it finally matures and sidelines the cowboys. Anyone in mainstream who derives any pleasure from watching our growing pains, might want to ponder on the reality that with much weaker webmaster communities, it will take mainstream commerce much longer to rid itself on those who prey on legimitate businesses.
I have NEVER seen an adult site that didn't employ deceptive tactics or practices.
or at least supported the garbage tactics paying people who do use deception to gain the site traffic.
they really can't say anything about zango. just because zango trumped their evil practices doesnt give them any right to complain.
popups, popunders, adware, spyware, misleading links, outright fake links and pictures, banner ads all over the place. its all garbage. stealing referal urls isnt any worse.
now shut the hell up and go make some more porn for us. very few people can wank to your whining.
Same here. I was already mildly annoyed at the tendency of people to use "adult" as synonymous with "porn". Like "adult entertainment". Lots of adults can enjoy non-porn related entertainment. Just call it what it is, okay?
Companies are bidding on their trademarked names as well as keywords to prevent the competition from grabbing these surfers.
;-)
This screams extortion to me as the companies are almost forced into buying Zango and ripping off their own affiliates in order to compete.
It will be interesting to see the People Vs Zango soon
Why not webmasters V companies that steal our affilate revenue?
We are all getting screwed right?
Zango must be laughing their asses off watching this.
This from the same guys who set up "www.whitehouse.com" to trick those looking for government information....
Where were you when the voynix came?
How the fuck is the parent flamebait?
For the same reason we disallow child porn, we should disallow BDSM: it leads to people getting hurt. BDSM is, essentially, rape under a different and legal name. This should change.
Do you know the actual reason we disallow child porn or are you just on the slow bus?
So you support rape? That's sick.
Adult-site owners and spammers both sell sex for the same reason: it sells. This does not mean that the majority of adult site owners like spam, just that those that send spam like to send sexual content (because it gets them cash).
That's like saying that Apple supports spam because of all the spammers/popup-advertisers that used the bullshit "free iPod" gimmick.
Indeed, sometimes the standard falls with public perception. If they went after a bunch of people from the Humane Society, many might be up in arms because they associate that group with good intentions and cuddly animals. Now if it's a bunch of adult sites that are targetted.... well they're going after those nasty perverts, and it's not so bad (in the opinion of many).
Now, not that they should have to, but what ways could the adult sites find or use to prevent Zango et al from stealing their links? A couple of thoughts I had would be along the lines of having a timed javascript that runs and corrects the URL's or textboxes, hidden boxes, or cookies etc that contain the site # that zango is stealing.
I'd say that 99% of them give the other 1% a bad name.
Don't get me wrong; I see plenty of malware in more "innocent" sites like those offering free smileys and screensavers (99.9999% chance they install some evil bastard program), but nearly all the non-free porn sites I've seen had some kind of scam going. Even non-porn affiliate programs, like one I used to manage, had the bastards horn in and try to slip their XXX sites onto a list that existed for a non-pornographic reason where they weren't relevant or welcome.
Don't believe me? Maybe I'll just go research a few of them to prove it...
Heh. Welcome to Zango.com. This is Zango.com. Welcome. This is Zango.com. Welcome to Zango.com. You can do anything at Zango.com. Anything at all. The only limit it yourself.
http://outcampaign.org/