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I would vote for STM to start the SHIT LIST. (1)

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I'm seeing alot of people saying sentences like:

Be it traffic source, ad network, re-targeting brothel, or whatever.

At first I was replying to bimoca's reply but for the sake of not diverting from the OP I thought it would be important enough to open my own thread and see if we can organize some sort of model of scrutiny. I backup my thoughts with other sources of information (linked) Down below you'll find other sources.
On a personal note, if you look left you'll see only a few posts here by me, i'm new to STM. I hope the experience I gathered in other places will prove useful to all of us together.
It's not about being fucking nice, this is about aligning our same interests on the same coinage we all use.

There is no governing law or policy for fraud traffic (yet), nor is there for shaving conversions, selling bot, anon, server/crawl and IP ranged abuse traffic, or other jiggle-juggles of the trade that widens the seller's margin over our backs.
Some large affiliates don't have to deal with this shit, they are revered as big whales and most of them aren't bothered by fraud as compared to smaller/beginning affiliates with no name and small deposits.
Moreover it's important to say that there are traffic sources selling excellent traffic, it's converting, it's profitable, etc.

The beauty of a totally free market is competition, ad saturation, or even a desensitized offer.. they all equally suck, but there it's all 100% natural.
The unnatural and disgusting occurrence is a traffic source that sells you the shitty remnant traffic while they shift and tap into your offer.
It's kind'a simple:
YOU were lucky enough to find a converting offer.
FRAUDULENT TRAFFIC SOURCE takes your offer with all the targeting info and data (they have 100% of the data you have to include goals/conversions), divert it to their team in-house to further optimize with better tools, they don't even need to overbid you and lose a dime they just use their own premium traffic and optimize over what you've already brought to them, and keep selling you remnant traffic (=real ip/users that already passed through pop-ups, redirects and other funnels that would make them desensitized = 0 conversions).
The Horrific part of it all is that some traffic sources are acting like Nazi surgeons, dripping conversions over and trying to figure out the breaking point of the poor soul that keeps on buying that remnant traffic, it's undead zombie traffic, that data is worth $0.Are you mad yet?

I'll blow up the picture even more to emphasize how rampant this is:
Feel free to connect the dots on this brilliant journalistic piece; 47% of all advertising traffic (google!), Admits that 56% of ads paid are not even seen, that itself was a serious load to drop before Q4 (which btw is natural, not everyone scrolls all the way down)
By just acknowledging a natural issue and revealing the truth lead to an opening of the can of worms of other "big name" traffic suppliers
This get's better...
3 IPOs drawn back after that bomb was dropped by google... Here's another piece of the action:

Some of those companies are looking at the experience of Rocket Fuel, an ad network that went public in September 2013 and months later was the subject of class action lawsuits, alleging the company's stock fell after it failed to disclose that a significant portion of its ads were being clicked on by fraudulent botnets.

a.) I don't care if they didn't police their publishers, Rocketfuel is selling bot traffic, PERIOD. No one will know if they made money from this indirectly or not, the only proof on the table is the negligence of selling 0 effect traffic for so much money, sorry but that's HORRIBLE and i'm sure you can relate to this if you buy display traffic.
b.) There is no use in getting into trying to coagulate the different liquid truths out there of what's stealing what's not, it's pointless BS, performance rules and they failed (only after finding out)
c.) Statistics is king and you can assume freely that if Rocketfuel, a public and large ad network was caught doing this, from such a huge list of traffic sources this is popular.

This is not asking affiliates to disclose your best traffic sources, only disclosing the ones that lost you money consistently and compared (in a significant manner) to other traffic sources. That, even indirectly has no effect on your campaign success.
Check out this amazing traffic source from jennatalia,
Statistically speaking, there is a large chance of people that are going to transfer their money to people in that list, for free.

Moreover, I totally understand some of the large affiliates are not interested even going into this fray, and I can only reckon there would be some "selfish-gene affiliate heroes" in the forum that will possibly support this theft as the "culling" effect of the less smart affiliates, with some "strong will survive" BS thinking that this monetary loss from affiliates would dwindle the competition (it has been proven the exact opposite throughout the last 5 years), so not only this is wrong but it also creates unstable campaigns across the market making more people believe you can make easy money by stealing without being caught online, ultimately reaching you, however smart you'll be..

Brass and tacks

What I'm hoping to acheive is some sort of remedy for all these issues, and even tough it wouldn't be 100% failproof, it could act as a deterrent and definitely a step forward.
is the worst name I could come up with, considering the contents it would be filled with, feel free to change the name.
It could be an anonymous poll and at least it would spell out "Caveat Emptor" to whomever wants to try this source.


Another reference,
Forex Peace Army took to whole new level, even though it's a bit far in my opinion and Forex being a different ballgame (the product has a 3rd party or IP inhouse ad-network.) Forex Peace Army did an amazing job protecting both the end-user and affiliate side, they were actually an integral part of what turned the industry around... So these days most successful affiliates in the forex vertical became internet assets such as websites, you don't have alot of CPA affiliates doing display these days; demand pushed the successful direct-marketers to become CPL sellers, basically leadgen agencies (cash in advance, no more free traffic BS. That's a total 180 degree.) since they understand they are getting hoola-hooped and story told what is a valid CPA or not (depending on their inside sales team success) these are CPAs of $200-300, with even lower than industry standards CR% and such a high CPA, this was bound to happen. So eventually the roof was torn off and now there was a place to actually hear the stories and see the staggering amount of affiliates that were getting royally screwed over serious amounts of money...

FXCM closed their whole affiliate network (no more free traffic for FXCM ), they were under scrutiny for a long time, they considered affiliates to be a waste of resources and that "it doesn't make financial sense" -which in my books means that they are no longer in control and they can't subsidize that affiliate department without periodically stealing conversions from that affiliate department. Moreover, a public company with over $80mm, doesn't want to deal with that shit anymore.. So now they are media buying in-house, using all the data they got free from affiliates over the years

Would be more than happy to get your thoughts if you actually survived the long read.
Thanks guys

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