To cut to the chase, SiteAdvisor has some serious flaws. I am saying this not to beat up McAfee for listings a false positive spammer rating (red alert) for three of our websites but to try to help McAfee fix the problem. I am publishing these (a) so McAfee can read them and take action, (b) so people who are wrongly targeted by McAfee as spammers can get a better understanding of what is happening (and get a nice dose of empathy by knowing they are not alone) and (c) to force McAfee to fix at least one that can be taken advantage of by people with no morals as they will see how to use it to harm their competitors.

Five Flaws

1) False Positive from a spammers hack

I don’t know what else to call this one. This is what happened to AnyCoupons. There was a false positive because McAfee thought that we sent e-mail to the account it used to sign up. McAfee doesn’t use an obvious e-mail address. I can’t find any in our database that use mcafee, siteadvisor or any variation of spam that I can attribute to McAfee.

The Sample Inbox below shows some of the e-mail that McAfee claimed we sent. Note that SiteAdvisor appears in 4 of the 5 listed e-mails. The problem is that we didn’t know that SiteAdvisor had registered. We took only an e-mail address, not a name. As I pointed out above, we have no record of SiteAdvisor in an e-mail address in our database. How could we have put the name with a random e-mail address? Well, we didn’t.

This seems to happen a lot and McAfee doesn’t appear to have a good system in place to correct it or to sniff out when this mistake happens. I would assume that McAfee has seen many situations like this and that the bright engineers at McAfee could write algorithms to tell when a false positive occurred based on the false positives it has retested.

As Richi Jennings pointed out on my original post, Rule #1 is that Spammers lie. That makes it tough for anyone to get rid of a false positive as they are guilty until proven innocent (which is rather un-American in my opinion). McAfee needs to have a better system for site owners to appeal its decisions. I have read far too many complaints on the Web (one from Angie Vandenbergh in the comments on the other post) about people who cannot get a retest. We lucked out as I write at a blog that is well-read. Most people don’t.

2) McAfee gets what McAfee asks for

I found that Excite.com was red flagged as a spammer in Yahoo search results. The executive at IAC whom I contacted is out of the country this week. We’ve had trouble connecting. So I contacted someone I know at another IAC company to see first about working together and once my problem was solved, helping them out. The response from someone at Excite was bizarre-big-company-speak. Basically, they said I should fend for myself. Good move. No retest for Excite.

The issue that Excite faces is that the registration form at Excite.com includes the following:

Excite may make the information that I supplied available to selected Third party companies so that they may contact me regarding services that may be of interest to me.

From what I understand, McAfee uses a bot to subscribe. The bot did not change the selection for receiving third party e-mail from Yes to No, so it requested to receive such communication.

Guess what… McAfee received that communication (all from the domain excite-partners.com), decided that it was unwanted (even if it requested) and deemed it to be SPAM. Bad McAfee!

McAfee needs to either redefine third party e-mail when requested or teach its bot to opt out. If McAfee is opposed to opt out options, it should make that public and it should notify websites that get a red flag for this so they can decide either to continue the practice and have a red flag or cease the practice.

3) Sub-domains

A non-techie friend read my last post. Because of it, he knew exactly what the red warning in Yahoo was about. he was surprised when he found it for a church! I wonder what the priest at Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church thinks of being labeled a spammer by Yahoo.

I don’t think that the church spams. The church in question has its website at naples.net. Some spammer probably used an account at naples.net (or there was another false positive). As a result, anyone with a site at naples.net is being dubbed a spammer by Yahoo! McAfee must correct this and take into account sub-domains. Imagine if Blogspot or Vox got pegged with this.

4) Use of HTML forms in ads on your site

OK, I don’t get all of the details on this one. It is Greg Yardley’s theory and you can find it on his post about McAfee’s SiteAdvisor. We don’t use ads like that so I can’t see how this happened to us.

5) Spammers link to good sites

Today I decided to check our other sites in SiteAdvisor. I was shocked to see that two of them were flagged as spammers. The reason? They had inbound links from, you guessed it, anycoupons.com, a site formerly known to McAfee to be an alleged spammer. AnyCoupons had a yellow flag at this point but these other sites were not updated. I don’t know if they ever would be. Another place that McAfee needs to improve is updating related sites.

This was cleared up today, thanks to Shane who commented on my last post. Again, there would have been no way for the average site owner to achieve this. Thank you, Revenews.

Why is this a problem? If you don’t like someone, build a new site on a shared server with a hidden domain registration. Put a form on the site. Request McAfee to review the site. Spam the hell out of any e-mail addresses you get. Just use some of the spam you get in your own inbox for templates. BAM! You now have a red flagged site. Now start adding a lot of outbound links to your competitors and watch their ratings turn red.

You can also use this if you want to see the type of e-mail addresses that McAfee uses to register. There were some questions about that in my last post.

Best Practices

I searched the SiteAdvisor website and was unable to find any best practices (e.g. never use opt out options for receiving third party e-mail) for websites. If McAfee is going to judge websites for commonly-used practices, it is in effect dictating best practices and should inform its victims of what it is doing, thus giving them the choice to comply or fight.

What to do if you get flagged by SiteAdvisor

Step 1 is to go to the SiteAdvisor site and request a retest. That won’t work but you have to do it.

Step 2 is to write an article on a well-read blog.

Step 3… I have no idea. If you have a suggestion for a more realistic Step 2, please post it below.

So, you ask, why does Yahoo think that AnyCoupons sends SPAM and how did our rep Outrider know this?

Yahoo now publishes a bright red warning about AnyCoupons its search engine results pages (SERPs). For any keywords where AnyCoupons remains in Yahoo, you will see the following warnings (this one for the keyword online coupons):

Yahoo’s New SearchScan

It looks like Yahoo may be looking for ways to lose to Google after thwarting Microsoft’s acquisition attempt. Yes, SearchScan is in beta but generally when a service is in beta, a company is responsive to issues, especially where a company is wronging an innocent party. The reason to put beta on a new service is to let users know that there are bugs. The responsibility that goes with that is to do something when users notify you of bugs.

SearchScan is supposed to warn users when Yahoo has bad search results. Yahoo is unable to root out sites that send SPAM or that have malicious downloads. Today Techcrunch reported that Yahoo had listed Google as distributing malware. It was an error in a listing and Yahoo corrected that error with little more than a blog post on Techcrunch… within hours. As you will read, we have had no such luck. If anyone at Excite has seen it, they haven’t had any luck either.

Why does Yahoo think AnyCoupons sends SPAM?

As I started to investigate why AnyCoupons was targeted by Yahoo as a spammer, I found that Yahoo bases its rating on information provided by McAfee. The McAfee report on AnyCoupons was interesting. When I first saw the Sample Inbox (see image below), I thought it was a sample of what the inbox might have looked like. As I viewed reports for other websites, I realized it was a partial list of e-mails that were received when McAfee tested AnyCoupons. I am guessing that McAfee registers with a random-looking e-mail address and then watches the inbox. The e-mail address assigned to AnyCoupons received 22 in a week last October. The only problem is that we didn’t send them and we didn’t sell the address. We don’t send SPAM and we never sell our members’ information.

Correcting Their Mistakes

Now you’re thinking that it’s a mistake and it should be easy to get it fixed. Welcome to my hell.

I submitted the form at McAfee to fix it. I didn’t expect to hear anything back and I have not.

I submitted the Ratings Dispute for at Yahoo. There is a form specifically for this issue so I knew that Yahoo would look at it, see its mistake and fix it. Why else would Yahoo have a form for this if it weren’t going to do anything about it. Here’s the response I received:

From: Yahoo! Search Webmaster [mailto:search-webmaster@cc.yahoo-inc.com]

Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:27 AM

To: David Lewis

Subject: Re: Rating Dispute (KMM124900088V43986L0KM)

Hello David,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search Webmaster.

We receive data from our partner, McAfee, about security risks on certain web sites. We display that data on our search results page, depending on the preferences you have set on your Yahoo! Search preferences page:

http://search.yahoo.com/preferences/preferences

In order to dispute or change a rating for your site, please contact McAfee by emailing them directly at:

support@siteadvisor.com

or visiting:

http://www.siteadvisor.com/feedback.html

Regrettably, Yahoo! cannot change a McAfee decision on a site’s rating, as their decision is final.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Search Webmaster.

Regards,

Gabriel

Yahoo! Search Webmaster Customer Care

A templated answer. Obviously Gabriel didn’t understand the situation so I thought I would point out that Yahoo is, in fact, responsible for what it publishes on its website. This isn’t part of a search listing being reproduced from a website. This is editorially added by Yahoo and is libeling my website. So I wrote back:

That is an interesting reply. Unfortunately, it is not acceptable and it is not correct.

Yahoo MUST take responsibility for what it places on its SERPs. It is Yahoo and not McAfee that is disparaging AnyCoupons. It is Yahoo who has created a policy to give inaccurate information on its SERPs. It is Yahoo that has chosen to remove AnyCoupons from Paid Inclusion. Yahoo has chosen to rely on McAfee’s inaccurate information and must take responsibility for what it does with that inaccurate information.

Why is there a link on the page for a Rating Dispute if Yahoo is unwilling to take action? It looks as if Yahoo does know that it is responsible but someone at Yahoo made a decision that Customer Service should send the misguided template below as an answer to disputes from legitimate websites.

I expect this warning to be removed from all listings for AnyCoupons on Yahoo and for our Yahoo Paid Inclusion campaign to be reinstated by Monday, May 12, 2008. Removal of our listings from Yahoo’s search engine is NOT an acceptable solution. If any action was taken by Yahoo regarding our Paid Search campaign or our Yahoo Directory listing, I expect those to be corrected as well by Monday.

Thank you for your immediate action on this matter.

-David

Good now Gabriel would escalate it as he will see that a template doesn’t fit the situation. Yahoo made a mistake in its new beta service. He will submit it to McAfee through the system that I am sure the two companies set up. (I used to negotiate deals like this with multi-billion dollar companies so I know that you set up direct lines of communication and escalation procedures. There are always bugs and mistakes when a new system comes online. You want to make sure that you catch them early and that your team is well-trained to keep problems in check.)

Gabriel’s reply:

Hello David,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search Webmaster.

As previously stated, Yahoo! cannot change a McAfee decision on a site’s rating, as their decision is final. Please contact McAfee to resolve any issues regarding your sites rating.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Search Webmaster.

Regards,

Gabriel

Yahoo! Search Webmaster Customer Care

WOW! Yahoo not only won’t take responsibility but it won’t do anything to try to correct it. Apparently Yahoo is content with having inaccurate information that damages another company on its website and won’t do anything to correct it… unless it’s Google.

It gets worse: Paid Inclusion

We used to get listed on Yahoo through its Paid Inclusion program (formerly Inktomi). I say used to because Yahoo terminated us from the program due to our alleged spamming. Again, we do not SPAM! I spoke to our rep at Outrider. (Yahoo transitioned our direct relationship for Paid Inclusion to a company that was bought by a company that recently was bought by Outrider.)

I know that Outrider, a massive ad agency specializing in search, will have a communication channel set up with Yahoo to handle issues with Paid Inclusion. You guessed it. My Outrider rep said that there is nothing he can do. He sent an e-mail to Yahoo and heard that it was up to McAfee. I cc’ed him on my e-mail exchange with Gabriel over the weekend but have heard nothing back.

There’s more: Paid Search

Now you’re remembering that I worked at GoTo.com / Overture in the early days. Surely my old company would know that I’m not a spammer and would call before taking any drastic actions.

On Friday we received a slew of e-mails notifying us that our campaigns were taken offline. Almost all of them. I don’t know why some were left.

So we contacted our latest rep who, like every other search engine rep, has told us repeatedly how helpful he wants to be. He was out of the office on Friday. Today his response came:

Hi David:

Hope all is well with you. Stephen contacted me regarding the declined ads you have in your account. After looking further into it, it turns out that your ads were identified by McAfee as leading to a site that appears to violate our guidelines. As a result, these ads may no longer appear in our search results. We welcome the opportunity to accept ads from you that comply with our guidelines. Examples of web site content that does not meet our guidelines include:

• Automatic downloads (threat of viruses, worms and Trojans to visitors of the website.)
• Security breaches (threat of downloads that may include spyware, malware, etc.)
• Sites that send spam emails to visitors of the site without their consent

For more information, please visit http://www.siteadvisor.com/

Also, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions. Thank you!

Again, Yahoo claims to be helpless at correcting its on-going and growing mistakes. It is heartwarming to know that Yahoo welcomes the opportunity to accept ads from you that comply with our guidelines. All of our ads do comply except when Yahoo runs them through an erroneous filter.

What does this mean for traffic?

They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words… it’s obviously not worth a lot of clicks…

Hey Yahoo… Get a clue!

So there you have it. My life as a spammer according to Yahoo. We have a hideous warning on algorithmic/natural results. We’ve been terminated from Paid Inclusion and mostly from Paid Search… and Yahoo says it’s not responsible. Of course by some miracle, the warning that Google is a provider of malware vanished today. Lest someone point it out in comment, we are not Google.

It wouldn’t have been an issue had Yahoo taken responsibility for its own site. It wouldn’t have been an issue had Yahoo or Outrider recognized that my company has had relationships with each them for several years and that I used to work at what is now Yahoo’s paid search division. I’m not looking for favors. I just think that there are ways to operate companies and ways to treat your partners. This isn’t it.

I have one last relationship with Yahoo. Do you think I should expect to have my Yahoo Instant Messenger account terminated?

I would like to thank Steve for all that he has done for Linkshare and our industry as a whole. I know that Steve will be successful in whatever he does and look forward to hearing what’s next.

    NEW YORK, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- LinkShare, a leading pay-per-action
marketing network, announced the resignation of Stephen R. Denton as
President of the company and two promotions in its executive management
team.

    Kelli Beougher, Vice President of Lead Generation Services, was
promoted to Senior Vice President and will add responsibilities for
LinkShare's push into new businesses, as well as day to day management of
its extensive publisher network. Beougher joined LinkShare in 2001, and has
held senior roles in client and network development services. Prior to
joining LinkShare, she held positions at both Priceline Webhouse and
LexiQuest. She began her career at GE Capital Management, and is a Six
Sigma Black Belt and holds a B.B.A. in Marketing from the University of
Texas at Austin.

    Arun Bordoloi, Senior Vice President of Services, who currently runs
LinkShare's Affiliate Marketing business, was given the additional
responsibility of leading LinkShare's growing Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
business. Prior to LinkShare, Bordoloi was Senior Vice President for
Draftfcb. Before that, he spent eight years at Razorfish
(AvenueA/Razorfish). Mr. Bordoloi started his career in management
consulting for Ernst & Young and Deloitte Consulting. He holds a B.S.E.E.
and an M.S.E.E. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

    While a search for Denton's replacement gets underway, his duties will
be assumed by John J-H Kim, who will become Interim President in addition
to his role as CEO of LinkShare's parent company, Rakuten USA.

    "During his tenure at LinkShare, Steve made important contributions to
the organization-helping to build a strong client services team, introduce
innovations in technology and service offerings, and expand LinkShare's
global presence," said John J-H Kim. "We thank him for his many
contributions to LinkShare and wish him well in his new endeavors."

    LinkShare was founded in 1996 and acquired in 2005 by leading Japanese
e-commerce company Rakuten. In recent years the company has expanded beyond
affiliate marketing to provide search and lead generation services as well
as support for video and mobile pay per action tracking to its customers.

If you’ve been to Affiliate Summit, you probably expect more of the same. I’m sure that will be the case but I’ve noticed some changes including auctions, races and hunting for treasure somewhere other than at the casino.

It’s all about charity

Missy and Shawn started raising money for charity a while back for the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. Flamingoworld sponsored the staff T-shirts last year and more money was raised this year. AOL’s Advertising.com’s Buy.at Affiliate Network won placement on the shirts for $12,000. Connie Berg, Andy Rodriguez, and Chris Sanderson all bid but you can’t blame them for saying uncle to big daddy AOL.

In the celebrity auction (insert joke here), several of us (including Tim Storm, Adam Viener and Scott Jangro) offered ourselves for dinner… that is, to have dinner with the winner some time during Affiliate Summit. I will be dining with Jonathan Miller of Forge Business who won me for the bargain price of $227.50. Watch his programs grow!

You still have a chance to get in the action with the Great Affiliate Road Rally of 2008. The entrance fee is only $100 and the bragging rights will be HUGE!

Hunting for Treasure with Converseon

Jamie Birch and team will be strategically hidden around Affiliate Summit at specific times in a new game called Where in the Summit Is Converseon. Follow them on Twitter and if you can find them, snap a picture and post it to Flickr, you can win prizes, fame and fortune. It’s great to see a member of the community doing something new and using technology to help. Hell, maybe I’ll hide pictures of Jamie and team around Cashbaq, especially if Jamie dresses up like Carmen Sandiego.

New Role for me

Oh no… Shawn and Missy are giving me a press pass. While I’m really in it for the WiFi access, I think I’ll have fun with it. If you want always had something you wanted to say on Revenews but were afraid to ask (or Wayne, Jim and Sam said no to you), let’s talk. I’m happy to have microinterviews with the starts of Affiliate Summit (that would be you).

Old Role for me

Kevin Lee of Did-It was itching for a debate. He picked trademark bidding and Shawn suggested asking me. You know I can’t turn down a fight. While I might have taken the con position on coupon sites a few years ago, I’m taking the pro position this time around. Somehow this remains one of the most emotional topics in affiliate marketing. Stop by on Monday at 11:30 to see if Kevin and I can shed new light on it (or if I can make Kevin cry).

So there you have it. I’m heading to Vegas as a Publisher, member of the Press, Auction Item, and Speaker with the possibility of being a Racecar Driver and Treasure Hunter. It should be a good time for all.

pepperjamNETWORK Launches today

Kris Jones and his team at Pepperjam today launched the aptly named pepperjamNETWORK.

What does it mean to you?

What makes this different from the 100 or so other networks that sell out Affiliate Summit’s exhibit hall, you ask? It is consistency and history.

Most of the dozens of affiliate networks that have been born in this decade sprang forth from super affiliates who negotiated above market commissions and shared those higher rates with others as a way to keep volume up (making money is the obvious goal of a for-profit so we can leave that out). They all seem to have the same merchants with similar deals that they pass around. But these great deals are short-term. They are here today but often may be gone this afternoon… without warning.

That’s not Pepperjam. Pepperjam began as a merchant, then became an affiliate and then became an agency. According to Kris Jones, before the launch of PJN, Pepperjam’s business was 5% affiliate (Shogging.com) and 95% agency.

There is a big difference converting affiliate deals to an affiliate network and migrating agency relationships to a network. I think we are about to witness why the latter works better.

Pepperjam manages affiliate programs mostly using CJ. PJN is built off of these merchants to start. They have either migrated to PJN or are running on both networks. That gave Pepperjam a great group to test with.

The sales team at PJN did a great job and has added a group of merchants that are exclusive to Pepperjam. I’m happy to see Judith Leiber, Ben Sherman and Jelly Belly on board and there are many more that are part of the network or coming online in the next few months. (Of course, I was tempted not to write anything to keep it a secret but I’m sure others will let the cat out of the bag.) The good news is that these merchants will be there tomorrow, next week and I think next year.

PJN Test Drive

Kris called me the day the beta went live. We’ve been playing around with it for a few months now and PJN is for real. It has the tracking we need although it seems to drop SIDs a little more often than other networks. There are a variety of reports and I’m sure more to come… just like the other major networks. This is where being an affiliate (and a search affiliate at that) helps Pepperjam. The Pepperjam team knows what publishers need and have built it into the system.

Product datafeeds went live yesterday and I haven’t had time to have my dev team implement them so I can’t comment on PJN’s datafeeds. I’m guessing they are what we need.

Last Friday I played around with the system and e-mailed in a question about a merchant. A few minutes later a window popped up with a PJN team member contacting me with the info I requested. It is basically an in-house IM window powered by Userplane. As an IM junky, I’m OK with that. Some people may not like it but they’ll have to see what preferences can be set. I’m happy to have the instant contact.

Transparency

That’s a big place where Pepperjam has been looking to make change: Transparency. Kris set a goal for PJN to facilitate communication between publishers and the folks we need to speak with, both at the network and merchants. That information isn’t always available with other networks. We’ll see how this plays out especially as the number of merchants grows.

The good news for PJN is that my biggest complaint is that I hate the black background. I like black T-shirts but find the black background to be bad Web design. Yeah, I’m Old School. Blame Alan Kay. Also the programmers set the default to 10 for most screens with no way to change the default globally or even when returning to the page. Of course, all of the other networks do it that way (numbers vary) so I can’t hold it against PJN. But it still bugs me. All of the standard image sizes seem to be there for every merchant and easy to find. Plus, they are mostly static as none of the merchants run casinos.

Conflict of Interest?

Of course we’re going to hear the usual chorus of “conflict of interest”. Yes, Pepperjam is a publisher, agency and network. If you are in the US and don’t like it, work exclusively with ShareASale which is the only standalone network. Otherwise, you can work with Google, Valueclick, Rakuten, Pepperjam or any super-affiliate that became a network.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about Pepperjam over the years. I’ve always found the Pepperjam team to be upfront and to deliver on what they’ve promised. (I only know one person who has a legitimate gripe with Pepperjam.) The client list is a resounding statement about the quality of the team. Plus, from what I hear Pepperjam has helped revitalize the small Pennsylvania town it is in and has given 20 and 30-somethings a reason to stay and somewhere fun and interesting to work.

A New Middleweight Contender

So you can call me a fan of PJN. I think it will be a contender (and if it will bulk up to heavyweight). Time will tell if PJN will take a bite out of CJ, Linkshare and Performics. It definitely gives companies who don’t want to work with the big 3 a choice other than ShareASale. (I still am amazed at how much Brian Littleton and his small team have done to build SAS. Pepperjam is over 100 people. SAS is a fraction of that. Yeah, I’m a fan of the SAS team as well.)

I’m looking forward to watching what Kris and his team do to grow PJN and what merchants they will add. Oh, and if you wonder where the name came from, I started to interview Kris but neither of us had time last week to do it justice. We got far enough for me to find out where the name came from:

I founded “Pepperjam” with my brother (Rick) as a gourmet food biz back in 1999. We developed a line of gourmet food products based upon a recipe our Grandma Jones made for us when we were kids. We put her face on the label and we even had a chef write a cookbook (with her face on the cover) using her products. My Grandmother originally called the product “Mississippi Mud” and never made reference to “Pepperjam.” However, my brother and I decided to rename the product line “Grandma Jones’ Pepper Jam” because we thought the name had more marketing appeal than “mud.” Anyway, we forged forward with the gourmet food business. My primary role in the company was marketing so I developed a strategy to build the brand and market the product line over the internet. We created a Web site at www.pepperjam.com and started interviewing Celebrity Chefs and gourmet food experts since I thought that would drive traffic to the site and allow us to cross market the product. Long story short…the celebrity chef interviews worked and we started driving massive amounts of traffic to the Web site through successful SEO. I also learned that I could buy traffic through PPC engines like GoTo.com so I used that to supplement traffic. Before long I realized that we could monetize the Web traffic beyond just selling “Pepper Jam - the gourmet food.” For instance, I started building out more and more pages on our Web site around promoting affiliate offers - I was using cross marketing with the existing site, pay-per-click, and SEO to arbitrage the offers. By 2002 I created one of the largest affiliate marketing businesses in the US. I left the gourmet food biz in early 2000 to pursue the affiliate marketing business exclusively, while also attending law school. At the same time I also started taking on clients as a consultant. While the affiliate revenue changed my life I saw an even bigger opportunity in creating an online marketing agency that offered management services in the key areas of search and affiliate marketing (and now online media buying and technology). That is what we’ve been pursuing here at Pepperjam over the last few years.

So go sign up for pepperjamNETWORK… you know you want to.

We have a new case that has hit our shores, the Double Cowgirl. Heather Foley and Kathryn Frankel left Performics to start Coupon Cowgirl. Well, from what I hear Heather went to Southwest Airlines where she started working as a Cowgirl and Kathryn worked at Performics when she became a Cowgirl. That means that while she was working on building a competitive site to the publishers she worked with, she was building her site. Hmmmm, something sounds like a pile of dung there, doesn’t it, cowfolks?

My IM has been ringing off the hook today. People remember that I coined the phrase Triple Jangro and wanted to know what I thought. Of course, they all told me what they thought and they were all outraged. Mind you, these are level-headed people, not the wackos out there who go off on anything. In fact, the Rumour Mill has it that a top coupon site resigned from Performics’ Pubisher Advisory Board today upon hearing the news. Whether or not the Cowgirls used confidential information, the concern needs to be addressed. I think we will hear something from Performics about this soon (public companies need time to address firestorms) and that the PAB will remain in tact.

To Performics credit, as soon as they learned about this Kathryn was given the choice to work at Performics or be a publisher. She put her cowgirl boots in the footsteps of the Jangro Triplets’ loafers.

I don’t mind having another coupon site out there. There are hundreds. There seem to be dozens more every month. The problem is when it is network employees who use confidential information to start one. Do you ever wonder why some affiliates won’t tell you what they do?

There is another problem. Kathryn made herself available for an interview with CoolBusinessIdeas.com. Her cows must have been working over time to produce enough for this one. [Note that CoolBusinessIdeas.com is listed as a partner of Cowgirl Coupons.]

You see, it turns out every last coupon site has been doing it wrong. We have no clue what we’re doing. In fact, almost all of us rely heavily on data feeds to create content for their sites and have little to no organization around their offer.

The real problem comes from the Smoking Six Shooter: Frankly, we were just plain frustrated with how many sites were doing it “wrong”. We’d always talk about how we would do things better if we had an affiliate site, and that’s how it started. Within two weeks of our first conversation we hired a designer and a programmer and we were on our way.

Of course with the great bluster that everyone else doesn’t know what they are doing (did CouponMountain’s parent just sell for $100,000,000 to $352,000,000?), I expect to see some real innovation from the Cowgirls. (Yes, I know it’s probably marketing bluster but there should be something to back it up, right?) [Note: I had a nice critique of the Cowgirls’ website. Suffice it to say that there is little new on the site. We don’t need to say what’s wrong with it or get personal. All of our sites can be improved. Most of us just don’t offer sweeping criticisms of other sites like that.]

So first is her admission of working on it while at Performics. The more important point is that they didn’t do their jobs while they were there.

People often ask me what value do the networks add. They wonder why they shouldn’t go direct with merchants once the relationship is built and sales are pumping. While I don’t necessarily want someone telling me how to run my business, if an employee of a network has been studying the space as part of her job and sees something that everyone in the industry is doing wrong, I would expect her to tell us. I think that Performics would expect as much as well as our improving our sites would lead to more sales for Performics’ merchants and more revenue.

The Real Discussion

Look, I not going to snipe at another site. However, I think that if you are going to sling insults so broadly you should have something to back it up. I ask that comments not be directed at the Cowgirls but instead address the issues for the networks. We all know that the networks make mistakes as we all do. The question is what can they do to address these issues and what should be expected of their employees.

• Have a non-compete agreement that forbids employees becoming affiliates / publishers for a period of one year. (Yes legal needs to review this for enforceability in several states.) I don’t think that it is a problem if network employees go to work for another network or for a merchant.

• All networks should refuse to work with employees and former employees of any affiliate network (or at least those on a list of networks they agree to). In fact, Performics has taken this to heart and has terminated Kathryn for a second time. The Rumor Mill is reporting that Performics will no longer be working with Coupon Cowgirl.
• Please add your suggestions in comments below.

OK, so it was 1.43 billion dollars (yeah, billion with a capital B).

I think it’s too early to say that this was a failed acquisition. It hasn’t met expectations in the two years since eBay bought Skype. So what!

I’ve been wrong before about potential but let’s look at Skype’s potential both within eBay and in changing the world.

Calling All eBay PowerSellers

Wouldn’t it be nice if buyers could reach eBay PowerSellers to ask questions? Or if shoppers could call stores on Shopping.com? Oh, maybe the Shopping.com calls could monetized… you think?

Pay Per Call

People are talking a lot about pay per call. They are talking. Some people are doing. Not many.

I Want my MTV

What I really want is to be able to make calls using Skype on any phone or WiFi enabled device. What’s so great about the iPhone and iPod Touch? Well, a lot. Now imagine using Skype over WiFi on your iPod Touch.

Something Is Missing

You can point out all of the missing pieces (e.g. a mic on the Touch). The main point is that the world isn’t ready for what Skype offers. Skype may also not be ready. Calls to landlines aren’t always clear. Pay per call isn’t built yet.

Again, so what! Given Skype’s user base and lead in market penetration and technology, this is one horse I’d be on in the long-run. Maybe the problems lie elsewhere.

I’ve been known to shy away from having my company called an affiliate. We’re a publisher which uses affiliate marketing as a monetization tool. Now this! How am I supposed to deal with a racist terrorist organization joining the industry?!?

The article didn’t mention anyone I know so I thought I should make some calls. But who would know? I thought maybe the OPMs might be managing the Al Qaeda affiliate program. In many ways there is a great fit but Al Qaeda likes to disperse authority so I didn’t think the likes of Brook Schaaf, Jamie Birch, Peter Fig or Linda Woods would fit in the corporate culture of Al Qaeda.

With that ruled out, I turned to figure out the network. I didn’t want to disturb Steve, Tom or Stuart on a Sunday. While Al Qaeda hates the US, it hates any country which is not ruled by Islamic law. That meant that it didn’t have to be a European network. In fact, Al Qaeda seems to prefer to use American technology and always aims for the biggest. That meant CJ, Linkshare or Performics. Performics seemed like a good fit as Al Qaeda tries to keep its operatives separated and with little information. Certainly we do see Al Qaeda trying to influence the broader movement and to control some of these affiliates in a more direct way,” said a senior… official. Who wouldn’t?

But I had to rule out both Performics and Linkshare due to their location. If Al Qaeda succeeds at hitting Chicago or New York, their network may go down. That left CJ. Santa Barbara is close enough to LA yet far enough to remain safe in an attack. But while I saw merchants from other networks at CJU last week, I didn’t see merchants of distruction from a terrorist network there. So I have no answer and the LA Times didn’t provide one. The LA Times did mention the network working from Pakistan. I haven’t heard of Valueclick, Rakuten or Doubleclick increasing their presence in Pakistan so maybe Al Qaeda is launching an independent network.

I could tell that Al Qaeda is making a move into our industry as the LA Times went on that a resurgent Al Qaeda is trying to expand its network by executing corporate-style takeovers… Does Al Qaeda buy one of the networks or is it the next Schoolpop / TrafficStrategies / Mezimedia? Again, the senior official: “… all of the things that would make an affiliate a subsidiary.”,/i>