Affiliate Making Money

Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser Accused Of Being Affiliate Toolbar Scam; Facebook Says It's Never Heard Of The Company

from the just-like-the-old-days... dept

There have been numerous reports lately concerning just how much money Facebook is making on ads. That's part of the reason it was able to get that otherworldly $50 billion valuation from some. However, some are noticing something fishy in the Facebook ad business. After seeing an AdAge article mention in passing that the third largest advertiser on Facebook is not a household namebrand, but rather Make-My-Baby.com. Google's spam-catcher-in-chief Matt Cutts did some digging and quickly noticed that the site appears to be a sketchy toolbar installer that tries to switch you to using Bing, and then it gets an affiliate cut of any search ads you click on going forward. Cutts also points out that the URL to tell you how to uninstall the toolbar leads to a 404 page not found -- and many folks have had difficulty uninstalling the toolbar.



Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, digs in deeper and wonders if anyone at Facebook or Microsoft is actually minding the store. Even if they didn't directly know this was happening, if this is really the third largest advertiser on Facebook, both of those companies had to know something was up, just based on the numbers. A company like Facebook is intimately aware of its third biggest advertiser, and if the company is really driving that much traffic to Bing, then Microsoft would surely know about it as well.



Of course, this is where the story gets more bizarre. While Microsoft's response to this story was to cut off the company, Facebook's response was to claim that the company isn't an advertiser at all, let alone the third largest advertiser on the site. So how is it that reports suggest the company is the third largest advertiser, when Facebook claims they're not an advertiser at all? The company does have a slight hedge, by saying that "any affiliates that try to push people there we would shut down." So it's possible that it was hidden through some sort of affiliate setup before Facebook caught it -- but no one seems to be revealing any of the details.



Either way, all of this sounds quite reminiscent of the old adware days, where all sorts of sketchy companies would trick people into installing software to scrape up affiliate revenue. We hadn't seen much of that lately, as many of the old players eventually got wiped out, but it's hardly a surprise that similar schemes would quickly jump up in a Facebook world, whether or not it was officially through Facebook's advertising functionality.

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It doesn't seem possible that there'd be money to be made from lending e-books. But at least one woman figured out how to do it, and more little lending conglomerates seem to be on the way.

When on Dec. 30, Kindle decided to allow its customers to lend copies of purchased e-books (but only for 14 days, and only to one person), a 40-year-old Canadian woman named Catherine MacDonald had an idea that literally popped up in her dreams. She started the Kindle Lending Club. It started out as a Facebook site, where she'd match up people who wanted to lend a book to people who wanted to borrow. It quickly grew out of hand, so she looked for angel seed money.



Finding someone who was willing to invest $12,500, she launched a slick Web site and created a place where people can come and look for specific e-books, or offer to lend them. So far, she has lent more than 1,000 e-books among total strangers and it's all worked without a hitch.

But where does the money come in? If the lender finishes the book within the 14-day limit, no fees are assessed and everything is free. But if the borrowers discover that they can't finish within Amazon's 14-day lending window (and things do come up in life--someone gets sick, or a business trip comes up) lendees can offer a link to buy the e-book and lenders share a portion of the resulting revenue through Amazon's Affiliate Program. For anyone familiar with Amazon's affiliate program, it takes a lot to actually make any money, but if the business person is dogged about going about it, he or she can make some bucks out of the program. So the lendee gets an e-book at a good price, and everyone's happy.

However MacDonald in Canada is hardly the first person to come up with the idea of the Kindle Lending Club. She was merely one of the first. Now there are many on the Web and not just for Kindles either. There are nook lending clubs popping up too. Kindles and nooks don't mix, thanks to incompatible software.

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