[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ebay-the-fbi-shawn-hogan-and-...

[2] http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate-sentenced-5-mont...

Also, Bitly and Pinterest probably got approval from Amazon for this scheme. Shawn Hogan misled eBay about what he was doing.

Another one that does the same is TabCloud Chrome Extension [3]. It scans all the tabs you saved, and stuff Amazon's affiliate links there. I fixed mine locally, but it's not a public license, so can't just fork and re-publish it.

[1] http://twitpic.com/4p9cpt

[2] https://goo.gl/YbYhTG

[3] https://goo.gl/OGdV3H

Amazon owes me > $40k after terminating my affiliate account for doing something similar in principle.

Their reasoning was that they felt the traffic I was driving in their direction was already going to be theirs, and that I was just injecting my affiliate commission into the process...as such, I was stealing from them.

would it be legal(ish) if you left affiliate links intact, i.e. only adding your ID to links that aren't affiliate links already?

IMO, Bitly may be putting every publisher at risk for legal action. Even though such legal action may never happen nor be likely, its still pretty shitty to do and as stated, illegal.

¹ https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

> Let’s assume that you’re endorsing a product or service on your site and you have links to a company that pays you commissions on sales. If you disclose the relationship clearly and conspicuously on your site, readers can decide how much weight to give your endorsement. In some instances, where the link is embedded in the product review, a single disclosure may be adequate. When the product review has a clear and conspicuous disclosure of your relationship – and the reader can see both the product review and the link at the same time – readers have the information they need. If the product review and the link are separated, the reader may lose the connection.

> As for where to place a disclosure, the guiding principle is that it has to be clear and conspicuous. Putting disclosures in obscure places – for example, buried on an ABOUT US or GENERAL INFO page, behind a poorly labeled hyperlink or in a terms of service agreement – isn’t good enough. The average person who visits your site must be able to notice your disclosure, read it and understand it.

As seen in the text above, this doesn't quite apply. The person placing the link is presumably _not_ actively promoting the product for a commission. Bit.ly is the one converting it into a monetized link, and Bit.ly receives the commission split with VigLink.

This is a very important distinction here. The FTC is basing their guidelines on a person that is compensated for actively endorsing a product/service on their web site. This wouldn't qualify and as such looks to be a use case not considered previously. It is also no t that different than Pinterest doing the same with links on their site.

> We hope the shortener never decides to add interstitials or otherwise "monetize" the link with ads, but we have no guarantee.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

It is an affiliate eat affiliate world out there.

We contemplated this kind of thing for about 2 milliseconds when OpenDNS had an ad revenue business and we couldn't ever wrap our heads around how it's even remotely acceptable behavior.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-insertin...

So long, bit.ly

URL shorteners are a terrible idea.

General purpose URL shorteners are just time bombs waiting to go off. They'll die and break all of their captive URLs or they'll realize they need to make some money and do something like this (or much worse). There's no third option.

As @DanBlake had mentioned, there is a serious FTC issue where individuals that were casually linking to a merchant are now unwittingly becoming advertisers. There's a decent snippet in the comments of the above link about that.

They claim that they are just turning non-affiliate links into affiliate links.

They also claim they are not overwriting other affiliate links.

So do they automatically recognize all other affiliate network redirects? What about direct linking affiliate programs? What about Pay-Per-Call programs? There are a number of ways this can go wrong and take money from other affiliates by hijacking the links.

Not to mention the fact that there is very little benefit to the merchant here - that is traffic that quite clearly they were getting anyways. There is complete intent to link to them, so why must they pay VigLink and Bit.ly for shortening the URL? That's a service being used by the individual linking to the merchant. It's not worth commissioning on, there's very little value to the merchant.

If you have an affiliate program with Viglink, please contact them and request they remove ALL URL shorteners from their program - it's not just bit.ly, it's tinyurl as well, and a couple others that I cannot recall at the moment.

Why are people still doing this? The only major platform with such limits is Twitter, but using a shortener no longer does anything - Twitter runs every link, bar none, through t.co and counts that URL length against you (which leads to fun situations like the 11 character link http://j.mp being treated as 22 characters).

Heh.

A couple weeks ago on Shark Tank Australia there was some lady trying to get funding for her website "Rich Gurl" (http://richgurl.com/) essentially what she does is goes out and scrapes sales from all of the major retailers, then when someone clicks a product and heads to that website a cookie is saved on your machine for a few weeks. Any purchased you might make in that window is counted as an affiliate sale and it is NOT illegal. This is essentially what Bit.ly are doing with their shortened links.

What Bit.ly are doing here is not illegal, it might be a bit deceptive but not illegal. The best course of action here would be for users of Bit.ly to stop using it and perhaps find an alternative. Eventually if enough people leave then Bit.ly might get the hint and stop what they are doing.

It may not be cookie stuffing by strict definition, but it's definitely affiliate fraud and I cannot see how any advertiser would be happy to pay bitly for adding zero value.

I'm confused as to what she was doing differently, amazon even offers product ad widgets to put on your page.

Shameless plug: Check out http://www.tracker.ly, where you can create every type of redirect link in one place.

They'll either get sued and/or the backlash will give them the hint to stop trying to be scammers.

https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate-eb...

Did bit.ly partner with merchants who are aware of this practice?

>Apparently Viglink said they would not be overwriting other affiliate links, however in the comments at Practical Ecommerce, it seems to indicate that it is happening in practice, and affiliates driving the links are not getting credit for doing so.

So basically bit.ly is cookie stuffing.

> We should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything, it excuses the behavior of bad companies, and it makes you sound kind of like a stoner looking at their hand for the first time.