A week or so ago, Bill Day from WhenU had a very thoughtful and largely helpful piece in iMedia Connection about the importance of obtaining permission from consumers before doing just about anything.  As we said in our last blog, ad relevance is a huge issue and we lead the industry in providing our customers with ads truly relevant and additive to their online search experience.  However, as Day points out, relevance means nothing without trust. 180solutions completely agrees with this point and continues to demonstrate to consumers that we are 100% committed to complete, simple, plain-language disclosure to every person installing our software, and that our software is only on people’s machines after they consent to the aforementioned disclosure.  Such disclosure and consent is not optional.  Not only is it bad business to do otherwise, it’s unacceptable to 180solutions and contrary to our mission.  Neither the advertiser, nor the software vendor, benefits from the installation of software not wanted by consumers.

One of the challenges in our industry has been maintaining control over third-party distribution channels.  As with most commercial relationships, initially relying on the contractual statements forbidding drive by downloads and other unauthorized installs was sufficient, and everyone agreed to those terms.  But as search marketing software became increasingly popular, not to mention effective and profitable, the ‘bad actors’ saw a way, much as they did with e-mail, to exploit and abuse an otherwise valuable new technology.  

Notwithstanding our good faith efforts to control distribution, a small minority of third-party distributors, without our authorization or consent, have abused our trust and violated the various codes of conduct by leveraging security holes in Windows or by using other nefarious means like botnets to distribute our software.

Bill Day, and numerous others, suggest there should be no third-party affiliate distribution because it’s “impossible to police.”

This is one point where we strongly disagree with Mr. Day’s column. (“Impossible to police” would be P2P services like Kazaa or BearShare, services the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed as illegal.)  The easy way out would be to drop all affiliate distribution, but this is not the solution.  Although 180solutions has come to realize that third-party distribution can be hard to police, we believe it is possible to properly balance who we do business with while providing monetization methods for the “long-tail” of web publishers and content developers.  This is our mission, and we believe it is anything but “impossible” to accomplish.

The third-party affiliate problem is certainly not unique to us, or our industry.  For example, Google will never completely eliminate click fraud.  It is something that will always happen, but you don’t see Google abandoning the affiliate model.  Perhaps an even better example is that of eBay.  Fraud happens every day on eBay despite world-class efforts by eBay to stop it.  They provide a marketplace for both good and bad sellers, and they even provide a platform for bad sellers to reap monetary rewards via PayPal. To be clear, we love eBay, and we think it is one of the best examples of how technology can enable the long-tail of the buyers and sellers across the world.  The point is that despite daily exploits of their marketplace, eBay has not given up on the affiliate model, nor would anyone ask them to.

We are proud to say that through experience, and after committing great time and resources, 180solutions has become much more effective in its efforts to police and control the distribution of its software.  We now turn away about 8 of every 10 web publishers who want to partner with us.  We’ve cut off more than 1,000 distribution partners since the beginning of the year, and last month we terminated the relationship with our biggest affiliate partner, Integrated Search Technologies, because we could no longer be an effective force for change there.  We have also drastically limited ActiveX installations by third parties.  In September, we introduced our S3 technology and began hosting the notification and consent process directly from our servers, rather than relying on our publishing partners to do so.  By January 1st, the rollout of this technology will be complete across our entire network, and 180solutions will no longer pay for distributions of previous versions.  We will continue to work with local, federal and international law enforcement on criminal cases, and to bring civil legal action when we find abuses within our distribution network.