What are affiliate program parasites?

One of the greatest banes of an affiliate’s life is theft. From the all too easily stolen Clickbank commissions to theft by parasites, commission theft is a fact of life.

Parasites are companies which keep replace your affiliate links with your own. You do the work, they get the money. They may also add their links to text in the visitor's browser that would not have been linked otherwise.

How do they do this? Most often by joining programs which don’t care how sales are generated, then getting visitors to their websites to download programs which add in their affiliate codes on products. Some do this with the visitor’s knowledge, but others use stealth adware to sneak in their links.

Now comes the hard part – keeping your commissions.

The simplest way is to research which companies allow parasites to join. Unfortunately, most companies do not care about parasites, so many popular programs are flooded with them. They won’t get all your sales, but they will get some. You can do some research on this on the forums at ABestWeb.

However, you cannot tell for certain if there are parasites in a particular program in many cases. Parasites sneak into programs even if they are kicked out, and may use a variety of usernames to hide their activities from the merchants. If you detect activity that you think is caused by a parasite, contact the program and see if they are willing to look into it. If you get a poor response, it may be time to consider dropping the program.

ShareASale is the only network I know of that does not allow parasites to join. It is against their terms of service. Individual programs within other affiliate networks forbid parasites, so do not dismiss a program simply because the network itself has not forbidden parasites. Do a little research first.

Simple link cloaking really is not enough to protect your links from parasites. However, link cloaking can help to protect you from other forms of theft, so I do recommend you purchase a good link cloaker. A popular one is Affiliate Link Cloaker. In many cases, the link remains cloaked even when you reach the final website, which is very helpful in protecting your affiliate income.

If you can, tell your visitors about spyware and adware and encourage them to regularly use free programs such as AdAware and SpyBot Search & Destroy. This will help keep the parasites off their computers. You can put information about these in a FAQ, add a link to your pages asking if they are having problems with popups (assuming you don't have any popups on your site), or find another way to mention it. Most customers probably won't pay any attention, but if even a few do it will help. You can also recommend alternative browsers, such as FireFox, which are currently less susceptible to parasitic programs.

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