Credit: Robert Scoble

Yesterday, Google concluded a 6-year legal contest with the Australian government’s consumer protection agency, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The Australian High Court ruled in favor of Google, who had argued that it was not responsible for the messages in the ads placed by advertisers on its results pages.

For more than a decade, coupon codes have served online marketers rather well. They’re an excellent arrow in the quiver, capable of accomplishing a variety of goals—gaining new customers, re-engaging loyal ones, clearing inventory and much more.

What an eye-opening few days! So many great people and so many interesting stories from all sides of Affiliate Marketing. When you get the chance to step back for a moment, you can really start to appreciate how sophisticated our industry is.

We just identified a new wrinkle in the mobile cramming scam we discovered last June. For a quick refresher, this is a technique Black Hat affiliates use to pose as legitimate coupon sites and trick users into entering their mobile numbers – thus entering them into a “subscription” service that ends up billing them monthly.

We're very excited to formally launch our Social Media Compliance Service.

We thoroughly enjoyed Affiliate Summit East and found it to be a great learning experience.

In the course of BrandVerity’s regular monitoring of our clients’ accounts over the past few weeks, we’ve become aware of a new way that Black Hats have been defrauding both retail companies and customers by posing as legitimate coupon sites. The scam works similarly to more straightforward affiliate hijacking, but with a new twist: instead of just stealing traffic, these scammers enter customers into “subscription” services that charge them monthly.

Affiliate marketers are known to have several strategies for increasing revenue- some of which are labeled as ‘black hat’ tactics and others as the more responsible ‘white hat’. However not all affiliate behaviors are so easily sorted into one of these categories, as is the case with Affiliate Toolbars.

We're excited to attend the Internet Retailer conference this year! The annual event will be held in Chicago from June 5-8. Stop by booth #357 or drop us a note if you'd like to schedule some time.