Recent Industry Drama

2 September
20 Comments
by nickycakes

It’s been a while since Nickycakes has posted a good wholesome drama thread detailing recent unfolding events in the industry.  There has been quite a bit going on worth mentioning, so here goes!  Since there have been [allegedly] some parties who [allegedly] like to [allegedly] send out C&D’s to blogs that [allegedly] say unfavorable things about them, the following is [allegedly] true:

Shawn Hogan’s Digital Point Cookie Stuffing LOLfest

So most of you may be familiar with Shawn Hogan, owner of Digital Point, the largest collection of idiots, mostly from poor countries, who are interested in making a quick buck online but rarely ever do so, and do nothing but ask stupid questions about adsense TOS, brag about their first $1 day with adsense, and sell links in their forum signatures, is being sued by ebay.  Here is a pic of Shawn (on the right) and his buddy shoemoney (on the left), all set to grease up their shiny craniums for an unforgettable evening:

Ok, so most of Nickycakes’ readers hate digital point, which makes this news uplifting and hilarious, mostly because digital point presents itself as a legitimate forum of make money online do-gooders who quickly berate anyone breaking the “rules” they make up.  The mods are quick with the ban hammer on anyone who criticizes the forum for anything as well.  So yeah, all in all, pretty funny, and bound to give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

But within this scandal can be found some very useful information.  The ebay lawsuit document details a lot of very interesting methods for cookie stuffing that shawn + friends were [allegedly] using.  Cakes isn’t going to detail everything about cookie stuffing for any newbies reading, but basically how it works is, if you are part of the ebay affiliate program, and you run a high traffic website, you can leave ebay cookies on visitors computers which will give you a cut of any transactions they do on ebay within the next 30 days or so.  Stuff enough peoples computers with said cookies and you stand to make a signficant amount of cash based on sheer volume.

Heres a few interesting bits gleaned from the pdf docs:  Shawn + friends had a system set up that would record each individual computer they had stuffed in order to not attempt to stuff cookies on that same computer again.  This not only makes things look more legit on ebay’s side in the logs, but prevents anyone trying to observe something shady from duplicating it.  Also, they attempted to geotarget the traffic and prevent any computers located in Santa Barbara, CA (headquarters of Commission Junction, who hosted ebay’s affiliate program) and San Jose, CA (ebay’s headquarters).  This was done to hide the cookie stuffing from ebay and CJ employees (obviously).  Interesting stuff indeed!  Aspiring search engine cloakers and cookie stuffers, take notice!

Ongoing ClickBooth vs Wickedfire Drama

Doesn’t seem to be much going on here.  The lawsuit is apparently still in the works.  One thing was obvious, though, at Affiliate Summit East: Clickbooth got a big ass double booth, but compared to pretty much all the other networks, you could practically hear crickets chirping when you walked past.  Being on the ground and knowing lots of other affiliates, Nickycakes can say with pretty good conviction, that this is probably due to them being dicks and making [allegedly] frivolous lawsuits and sending C&D letters to innocent bloggers who are merely observers.  Some people seem to have it in their heads that the word of Jon Fisher (owner of Wickedfire) is taken seriously by everyone in the industry, however, anyone with a decent amount of experience knows that he is just another affiliate like everyone else and not the leader of the pack, so to speak.  So suing him is pretty much a waste of money.

AdExhibit Vanishes With Everyones Money

So a couple weeks ago it seems Jason from AdExhibit, a new-ish affiliate network that had been growing in popularity, completely vanished and nobody was getting paid.  People who were owed money attempted to track him down but ran into roadblocks as his numbers had been disconnected or were ringing busy constantly.  People assumed the worst, that he had possibly had an accident of some sort.  Well the dude resurfaced today to say that he had been going through some family issues that had prevented him from using the internet (???) and said he would be paying people, but offered no sort of appology.  Good way to ruin any future business opportunities in this industry, pretty much.

Copeac <3 Azoogle

If anyone was at Affiliate Summit West in Vegas, you may have noticed that the Azoogle booth and Copeac booth were right next to eachother in the exhibit hall.  Copeac and Azoogle are obviously competetors, but everyone has strong suspicions  that they strongly dislike eachother.  At the Copeac booth there were flyers that said some bad stuff about “The Competition” and had a big arrow on the flyers that pointed right at the Azoogle booth next door.  At Affiliate Summit East this year, they weren’t so lucky, and they were positioned several booths apart.  Never fear, though.  Copeac had some awesome branded nerf sling dart things and were happy to provide Nickycakes with a good suggested trajectory.  Hopefully Nickycakes’ ‘zoogle AM, THE SESSLER, didn’t get hit in the head or anything :..(

Keep it reeeeal.

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