LiveJournal Accused Of Redirecting Links, Swiping Affiliate Fees

from the trust-issues dept

Fri, Mar 5th 2010 9:27am — Mike Masnick

You may or may not remember, many years ago, that one of the "tricks" used by adware was to hijack affiliate fees. Basically, the way it would work is that the adware would watch where you were clicking, and if the URL was for an online store that had an affiliate program or affiliate link, the adware would swap in its own adware account info, allowing the adware company to collect the affiliate fees rather than the company/individual who actually earned it. Sneaky.

However, now there are some claims that popular blog/community site LiveJournal is doing the same thing itself. Shawn Tutt points us to a story claiming that LiveJournal is redirecting outbound links from users such that they appear to strip any affiliate codes and add LiveJournal's own affiliate codes to a long list of popular e-commerce sites. It's hard to think of a better way to piss off a bunch of your own users than to replace their own affiliate codes with your own. Once people started complaining about this, it looks like LiveJournal stripped out the code. Still, it does raise some really big trust questions about LiveJournal, if it thought this was a good idea in the first place.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: affiliates, links, livejournal
Companies: livejournal

11 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

discojohnson, 5 Mar 2010 @ 10:03am

less nefarious
on links that did not have an affiliate code, inject your own. leave those that had one alone. i wouldn't mind a setup like that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Rob Wynne, 5 Mar 2010 @ 10:40am
  
  Re: less nefarious
  on links that did not have an affiliate code, inject your own. leave those that had one alone. i wouldn't mind a setup like that.
  That was allegedly what the code was supposed to do, but it was poorly implemented, according to someone at Livejournal. (I can't find this immediately, it was buried in a comments thread.)
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Joel Coehoorn, 5 Mar 2010 @ 10:11am

StackOverflow
The popular programming help site StackOverflow.com does this as well, but before they started they asked the users about it and got approval from most of the larger contributors.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Luci, 5 Mar 2010 @ 2:00pm

Addendum
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Luci, 5 Mar 2010 @ 2:01pm

Addendum
(Frickin' hell!)
*AHEM*

From the vichan.livejournal.com link provided in the article:

'[info]marta has posted some information saying the code was supposed to add "this link came via lj" affiliate info to non affiliated links -- the link would go to exactly the same place it was supposed to, but there would be information added saying that the link had come via LJ -- which makes a lot more sense (and sounds thankfully less sinister) than hijacking people's links and taking them to advertisers, but didn't work as expected. It's still being scrapped.'
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
David Gerard (profile), 6 Mar 2010 @ 3:27am

Amazon is Not Amused
http://shatterstripes.livejournal.com/1067252.html?thread=9179636#t9179636

Quote from thread:

"Amazon replied to me with a form letter. The summary is:
. Thanks for telling us.
2. Anybody who lost revenue (or believes they lost revenue) due to affiliate hijacking should let us know via the Associate Program contact form. We'll fix it.
3. We Are Not Amused.
4. And for obvious business reasons, we can't tell you exactly what we're doing. But thanks for the tip-off, we're probably doing something. Maybe.
hich is pretty much what I expected, although #2 was a bit of a nice surprise."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 14 Jun 2010 @ 7:46am

Unbelievable if this was any other industry there would be legal action. I've used them before for my groom wedding speech site but I'll think twice now. I've heard these tales before but naively did not believe them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 2 Nov 2010 @ 7:54am

Hmm that's weird - I've used them in the past but never had anything like this ever happen to me! I hope it's sorted out soon because I really love livejournal and I find it hard to believe that they been involved in shady stuff like this. John from mother of the groom dresses
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Paul, 17 Feb 2011 @ 4:22am

...
"How can we piss off our users today?" "I know, let's convert all their affiliate links to our own..." "Jim, you're a legend, have a raise..." *facepalm*
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Perth Limousine Hire, 4 Nov 2011 @ 7:30pm

LiveJournal Accused Of Redirecting Links, Swiping Affiliate Fees
Hi admin.
This accusation to LiveJournal is definitely untrue and no basis!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Canvas, 21 Sep 2012 @ 8:26am

The truth will prevail ...
but it will be better that it prevails at the right time
[ link to this | view in chronology ]