Mixed opinions in here!
About saying HaRRo's name: I just think he's swell. Not only that, you could study this guy and see all kinds of things that are not obvious to surfers, but genius to earners.
I was asked how I know the URL services are doing this: Don't be a fool. Do you think ClickBank is shaving? Or is it tinyurl? And how hard do you think it is to setup a script to snatch just 1 out of 100 clicks and not be detected?
I didn't say you'd just jack their links... Or at least, I didn't mean it that way. I meant that you can be wise about it and WATCH which of your supplied links are getting hot. Do a tiny bit of investigating to see exactly how it's set up (in most cases, you're just going to look at it and say "is it a hop? yup." and it's yours after that).
Again, you're not taking the whole flock and then running a day of refid replacements on all links... that would be retarded (or the obvious thing to do if you are daft?). I would think it would have been floated right to the top of the brain that this idea is something that you start with and then impliment about a month after people start catching on (you do this after you already have millions of links on the web - like tinyurl... You tell your site "for every 1000 clicks that equal 123.vendorabORc.clickbank or whatever the structure was, change 50 of them to 456.ven... you get the idea. It is only 50 clicks per thousand on any given link you have defined to be "thieve worthy", but those clicks add up when you think of how many links you can taint. Instead of promoting offers, you let other people promote offers, and spend your time sniping instead... ).
Get a cool enough tiny-url domain name and people WILL use that shit, if only to trick people. THEN you have that "second tier" of affiliates who learn about your service the same way they learned about tinyurl. THEY SEE SOMEONE rick-rolling with it and go "holy shit, I can hide my link there! what a dumb fuck this guy is wasting a shortening service on memes and pranks or stupid ass waste of time 'traffic based' games"
See?
You have like 10 people - just ten, and that's tiny - especially if you OFFER them TRACKING (main point of the post... you see how big alternative link shorteners are for twitter) that you can (obviously) doctor to ignore your medlings.
Don't try and tell me you get a click on your tinyurl for every visitor that sees it - you're a liar. That in itself is enough to see.
Also, jr VIP buddy up there said they do it themself - proof of concept. So, I'm not even new with this, I just exposed it lol.
Anyone with a wise mind would obviously do a little investigation of each affiliate they butthump with this making sure they are the middle-leet's who are good at promoting and bad at protection. It's not like you are taking all of their sales...
And hey, don't move my topic to Jvip unless you give me access to it! lol <3
If you think tinyurl is not doing this, you are being naive. Type is movable, and no one out there with a URL redirector service - especially custom ones - does not know that.
And in terms of, er, clicking thousands of time to test... You are losing more money/time that way than tinyurl is taking from you...
Ok, enough beating the doubt, enjoy guys! I can;t use it, not wise enough with the scripting
bonus: aside from (tainted) tracking, offer your users the ability to blank a referrer. Guess what happens if you do that? You get everyone too scared to say anything if they even could figure it out. You win again. And you create a user base who is the type to get those huge bursts of traffic they need to hide...
This is so evil. lol. I still hope to make friends and business partners here... Did I kill my trust ability?
