Subject: referral/affiliate schemes

From: Andrew Gierth <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 04:40:46 +0100

something else that springs to mind that should be noted somewhere in
the draft:

there have been a number of cases of companies using referral or
affiliate schemes of one sort or another, offering people incentives
to attract other customers to a service. This has ranged from extreme
cases like the "get paid to surf" schemes such as alladvantage.com or
gotoworld.com, though to much more low-key schemes primarily based
on web links.

Virtually all such schemes are inherently dangerous - the reputation
(and in the most extreme cases the connectivity) of the principal is
potentially at risk from the misbehaviour of any of the members, and
the more people are involved (and the less regulation applied) the
worse it gets. There is a perception, especially in the cases of
alladvantage and gotoworld, that any claimed anti-spam policies are
merely lip-service, that they know that their members will spam on
their behalf, and that they gain as a result (both by attracting new
members and by not having to pay the spamming member for them).
Those are extreme cases but this kind of problem has been seen at
smaller scales too.

--
Andrew.

---

From: Austin Bill-P23393 <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 11:46:25 -0700

This "Get paid to surf" SPAM problem has become so bad that I have a filter
which automatically dumps any message which says that into a folder.  I then
rapidly scan for "real" messages and delete the rest of the folder.

This is actually the first message I have not just deleted in the past two
months.

--
Bill Austin  http://home.att.net/~wbaustin/
Arizona Internet Professionals Association  http://www.azipa.org/
AzTeC Free-Net  http://aztec.asu.edu/
Experience the Game!  http://experience.motorola.com/
Humor from Arizona  http://azhumor.listbot.com/ or
mailto:[email-masked]

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Gierth [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 1999 8:41 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: referral/affiliate schemes

--
Andrew.

---

From: "Gavin, Ted (COR-EX)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 10:05:33 -0400

Okay, let's expand on this.

What angle should we take when approaching this? I see a bullet-point in the
DOs and DON'Ts section, warning people away from this type of relationship.

But, beyond being a hassle, we can't really say that the concept of
affiliates should be avoided...only those that spread the work via spam,
yes?

tg

> From: Austin Bill-P23393 [SMTP:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 2:46 PM
> To:   [email-masked]
> Subject:      Re: referral/affiliate schemes
>