By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.
There's got to be something more here. Redirects through seven partners - most likely paying on net 30 terms and taking a cut of the revenue themselves for brokering - would reduce the money torrent to a long-delayed trickle. Perhaps the intermediary partners are placing cookies for targeting purposes and therefore adding a bit to the revenue stream?
I'm also surprised that clicks are being generated from Google, of all places. Faking the click from an affiliate of a comparison shopping site would be much more lucrative (higher PPC due to higher purchase intent) and much less likely to result in aggressive countermeasures (comparison shopping sites aren't Google.)
They replace ads only with consent from the publisher and the browser user and only with no tracking involved. This is no more unethical than blocking ads altogether.
Do advertiser's own space in your browser? Do they own the right to consume your data bandwidth? Do they own the right to hijack your privacy?
If the answer is no --- if you believe your browser and your privacy and your bandwidth belongs to you, you should check out Brave. Unless you are affiliated with the privacy invading ad networks?
Ah, but that’s not the only way —- backlinks, people copying the link and sharing it on social media, and mentioning the site all grow traffic immensely, and some of that traffic won’t have ad blockers :)
IIRC one of the sites still has a “buy me a coffee” link, as if the owner needs it.
I like to use wheregoes.com to probe links. I'm surprised at how many redirects some of them have. I get that an ad link might go through an ad channel, but clicking one non-spam link from a reputable company can plant cookies from a whole bunch of websites.
Humorously tomuse.com uses the "Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress" so you can't tell where anything is going (though it does use proper 301 redirects). These things are normally used by scuzzy people trying to hide affiliate stuff. It looks free, but a competitor even has one of those really long marketing pages that are usually used for real estate and eBooks:
They're going after the companies that actually drive the traffic. If Google News, Hacker News, Reddit, etc isn't linking me to your site... I'm never ever ever going to see your site. You still get the page views, ad revenue, etc when someone else sends me to your site, so what's the beef?
They just use yahoo/bing/google results and redo the links where they're an affiliate. Which means the search rankings are decided by a third party who has no hand in the affiliate pot.
Looks like for a brief period of time they redirected all of their traffic to an advert for their new e-book.
Seemed to have annoyed a few people by doing it and they've put it back.
I can understand sites like this needing to make money, and I love the articles on there, but redirecting all traffic seems a bit of an extreme solution to a revenue problem?
They're ripping from sites that are ad supported. So the site doesn't get the ad impressions, and the plugin developer could (if they put ads in the plugins). Site operators hate it, and are constantly blocking them.
Basically, they reach out to about 80 sites and scrape for links, then resolve those. It's a pretty insane process, but they've got it working just well enough.
They did this to themselves as it's against their guidelines to pay for page ranked incoming links. It was simply because in the end they were paying for the link to their site
This somehow reminds me of the time when Chrome marketing ended up paying for links to their site, and then the Web search group had to punish them with a demotion.
Or did they stop doing that?
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