AffiliateFairPlay has just released a case study looking at the impact of contextual adware advertising in and on affiliate marketing. Many may be surprised by the findings and it may challenge some of the preconceptions about contextual adware. We attempted to give a broader view of this type of advertising. We focused our testing on top internet retailers. We looked at such things as how many merchants were having pop-ups delivered over their sites, who were placing the ads, to what degree were affiliates responsible for the pop-ups, how many pop-ups involved forced clicks (or cookie stuffing), which networks were involved and to what degree. From the results, it seems to me that as an industry we are not adequately addressing the issues and practices related to this type of advertising. The full report can be found here.
