anyone-know-what-deal-is-with-zango


The image to the left is something that surfaced on the murky waters of the web a few days ago - Zango is just one of a number of words I monitor on a regular basis to see if anything's kicking off on the Internet. Well, my Zangometer suddenly off the scale and I just had to get to the bottom of it.

Seems like a whole bunch of adult webmasters are suddenly taking exception to some of Zango's activities - the key issue seems to be around cookies, and how they can be overwritten to provide the last guy through the door (in this case, Zango) with the claim to the sale, rather than the original affiliate / webmaster / whoever. I say "seems", because the issue is actually somewhat more complicated than what the webmasters or Zango themselves are actually arguing about (cookies). See a great detailed post by Ben Edelman here, and another post here from a site vistor for more information on this.

This has caused a forum flamefest - I imagine the adult world accounts for a fair slice of Zango's profits, so I can see why they'd be quick to want to put this fire out.

Warning - Some of the pages I link to are adult webmaster forums, and so WILL CONTAIN BANNERS, IMAGES AND FLASHING PICTURES OF MANBITS AND LADYBUMPS. CLICK THEM AT YOUR OWN RISK. NO REALLY, DON'T COMPLAIN TO ME IF YOU GET SACKED OR SOMETHING.

Of course, you could just turn your images off. But then I can't have the humorous warnings. And now that we've got that out of the way...

A few days ago, I saw this rather odd entry on the Zango blog concerning cookies. I say odd, because I couldn't quite work out why Zango would suddenly choose to write about them. Cookies? We're writing about cookies now? Why would someone bother writing about cookies and give it a tone so serious it reminded me of Churchill's funeral? Well, a quick scan of the adult webmaster forums provided the answer. On these forums, adult webmasters were having a great big rant with comments such as

"So who thinks they lost sales due to the Zango installs last Saturday"?

(above quote taken from the title here. WARNING - NAKED BITS).

Now, at this point I'm hooked - what exactly happened over this particular weekend in question? I had no idea, but I was also finding lots of people on other forums linking to this article by Ben Edelman (scroll down to the 180 Solutions stuff). However, the article is not new...it's from July 2004. So that's even more confusing. Why would people be complaining about something that's been around since 2004? Could it be that people from the adult industry had no idea this kind of thing was going on?

Here's some more links...a timeline, if you will:

3rd October: Warning, naked stuff. People are first complaining about "Zango stealing their sales". Looks like something blew up big time on some other sites and this is the first wave of radioactive fallout. Link here.

3rd /4th October Onwards: Warning, some probable naked stuff. Lots of these posts appear from around the 3rd onwards - you can probably find them assuming you don't go blind looking at the nudie pics. Someone definitely has a bee in their bonnet about something. Link here. Here's a longer one here.

5th October: Warning, boobage and nakedness on banners. Oh man, here's another angry thread. Link here.

By this point, you can definitely sense all is not well in the adult webmaster camp.

8th October: Warning, no nakedness whatsoever. Doh. The Zango blog suddenly attempts to sort out the problem of cookie fun with this article. Now that we can see all this crazy anger on the forums, is it likely that this writeup about cookies is designed to stem the tide of angry net nerd anger from the adult webmaster world? I'd hazard a "definitely maybe" as a guess.

10th October: Warning, nakedness, but its all in the name of investigative research so that's okay. Lots of angry threads all over the place - here's another. This one is particularly interesting, because it specifically refers to the Zango Blog entry as "Zangos Response". The content is basically more people screaming for blood.

At this point, it's time to link to the "big reveal" - the individual at the heart of all this fury apparently riled Zango so much with his allegations about their "cookie practices" that they sent an Email out about him to their affiliates. What is he alleging? That (quote time):

Zango (180solutions) and metricsdirect, which they use to get advertisers for their adware toolbar are stealing sales from you and your company by popping up ads over your website with their advertisers affiliate code in it. For example, when users with this software enter Amazon.com, a cookie is written by this toolbar and Amazon won't get the sale which should be 100% theirs.

Zango refute these allegations.

Of course, as we've already seen the issue is somewhat more complicated than some random arguments about cookies - it's actually more about these webmasters complaining about potential commission stealing. I'll be interested to see how this one plays out.

You can see the mail here, along with his reaction to their various points. Not work safe, before you ask.
posted by paperghost at 9:41 PM

source:
http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2006/10/anyon...with-zango.html


more coverage:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/10/14/1952229.shtml
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/en...-my-friend.html
http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/3610
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=856

Sabu