Freeze That Commission
I had to file this one under “Just for Laughs” because it sure made me giggle. There are times I absolutely LOVE this Industry and this is one of those times.
Freeze.com offers “free” screensavers which come bundled with a multitude of adware applications. They have a pretty active affiliate program (thanks Freeze affiliates for spreading the problem!). They also own several other web properties, one of these being Screensaver.com, which has Freeze.com affiliate traffic redirected to it.
I’m out and about on the Internet, doing what I do, and I click on an affiliate link for Freeze.com which goes to Screensaver.com. What happened reconfirmed my belief in poetic justice and ironic humor.
You have to see the video to fully appreciate things. So go ahead and watch the live action. Don’t sneak down to the spoiler…go ahead and watch it first. 
For starters, the affiliate link I clicked on belongs to ShopAtHome. I was redirected to a landing page on Screensaver.com that was a, drum roll please, parked domain landing page! Cookies were set, affiliate tags were passed in the URL but I certainly didn’t arrive any where I could download a free screensaver.
Now Screensaver.com itself is still accessible. But the landing URL for affiliate traffic, http://lan.screensaver.com, coughs of the parked domain page.
Now I just find this more than a bit amusing. I’ll be…..Freeze.com affiliates with those Screensaver.com links aren’t earning commissions. And I did check some other Freeze.com links with the same URL structure as the one ShopAtHome is using and the same thing happened. I wonder how Freeze.com affiliate’s feel about being cheated out of their commissions??
The icing on the cake is that the links on parked domain pages on Screensaver.com end up going through Overture listings.
Yes indeed, there are days that I really do just LOVE this business.
“I wonder how Freeze.com affiliate’s feel about being cheated out of their commissions??”
If they’re so stupid that they choose, in the first place, to promote the spread of crapware that steals from them, they probaly don’t “mind”.
Comment by RhinoFish Media — December 18, 2006 @ 1:18 pm
From the looks of it you have some sort of software on your PC that is redirecting 404’s. When I visit the URL in your capture clip (http://lan.screensaver.com/LPQueue/217/index.asp?lusid=147012121&nat=1&av=0&ad=0&cc=us&lgid=324&a=7548&f=default&SAHCID=22707217RP7990&afsrc=1) I get a screensaver landing page. My guess is for some reason at the time the page was down and your 404 was hijacked by software that was installed on your PC. Try going to (http://www.google.com/?lusid=147012121&nat=1&av=0&ad=0&cc=us&lgid=324&a=7548&f=default&SAHCID=22707217RP7990&afsrc=1). I get a 404, but I am willing to bet you get the same landing page you saw before. Surely google isn’t serving that up. Next time you decide to blog make sure your “Playing Fair”.
Comment by AffilateMedia — December 18, 2006 @ 10:08 pm
Hi AffiliateMedia,
Nope, there was no 404 hijacker involved. Here’s why and how I know (some techie stuff on the way):
1. A hijacker would have done just that…hijacked my browser redirecting to another site showing some type of returns. But you will see in the video I’m still on the lans.screensaver.com domain.
2. I would have seen server calls going out at some point to the 404 hijackers servers. I didn’t.
3. I would have gotten a 404 server response in my sniffer logs for the lans.screensaver.com request. I didn’t. I got a 200 response, which is an everything’s a-OK response.
4. I reviewed the source code of all the activity that occurred on the screensaver.com domain. While the contents of the screensaver page were transmitted in gzip, my sniffer program both reassembles and decodes such transmissions so I can view in text. I did review. A form GET command is used to bring up the listings, but still from the lans.screensaver.com page.
5. Screensaver.com cookies were both read and dropped from that page. Couldn’t do that if the page had been hijacked away.
6. I did it from more than one computer and got the same results.
7. Going to the nonexistent Google page you linked to on the same cmputer I made the video on, I get the expected 404 page on Google.
Now taking your word that you arrive at screensavers as you should from going to the URL in the video…
If the page was a 404 for some reason (which is when a 404 hijacker would take over), why are you able to access the page correctly?
That aside, from the source code of the page I know that they also are capturing the end user’s IP address. It’s actually displayed in the source code of the page. So a more likely explanation is that Freeze.com is doing some type of geo-targeting for when the parked domain listings and when proper access to their site occurs. If you notice in the final URL destination, ASP coding is being used which allows for such dynamic delivery of pages.
Now that final landing page is handed off to Akamia servers (not uncommon for high traffic sites), so I suppose there could have been an issue with Screensaver.com and their Akamai account and Akamai was responsible for that page. But then you wouldn’t have gotten to the correct page.
And even if that was the case, the point is still valid that Freeze.com affiliate traffic isn’t ending up where it should.
Comment by Kellie AFP — December 19, 2006 @ 3:55 am