This is something near and dear to me as I am a firm believer in protecting my clients and my affiliates. I have helped to clean numerous programs and have a few major name brands now under my belt which are clean or are being cleaned.
When upper-management wants you to partner with various parasitic and adserving applications, what you should do then is take them to affiliatefairplay.com and have them watch the various video tutorials on how adware works and how it can steal from your bottom line and internal marketing efforts.
Some things you may also want to point out to them are:
With a slowing economy, it is important to make sure each sale is accounted for so you know where to spend your dollars. By allowing adserving adware applications within a program, you will now be crediting the wrong channel for a sale, double crediting the same transaction, etc...
Another thing to point out is an example of how adserving applications can overwrite your internal marketing efforts. A good example is PPC. You pay for the click and when the user who has the parasitic application hits your site off of the click you paid for, you now not only paid to bring in the sale yourself, but you are now paying for the parasite to get a commission of the sale you generated internally.
Parasitic applications hurt everyone except for the network that allows them, the parasite and the AM/OPM who gets commissioned off allowing them to steal from the company and from the company's affiliates.
If you are a manager and you find out employees are stealing money or merchandise from the company, would you:
A Congratulate them
B Ask them to find more people to do the same
C Fire them
Think about that then apply it to parasites and then rethink your decision of partnering with them.
One thing though, not all applications are parasitic, it is the adserving ones and cookie stuffing ones that are bad. Just wanted to point that out. Some toolbars are only used for search purposes and have deals with search results companies and do not set cookies. I'm not going to say which ones they are
Great thread Linda!
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