Leaving The Day Job

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As a geek and a paid up member of Liberty I take a close interest in internet privacy and it’s been all over the news for the past week or so. There has been a huge outcry and backlash against Phorm who have signed deals with major ISPs to track their users’ browsing habits and serve them targeted ads.

You can see to the right of this article that I’m linking to one of the anti-Phorm campaign sites. But as an affiliate my income depends on being able to track users as they move from my site to the merchants and retaining that tracking for perhaps 30 or more days. How can I be pro-privacy, anti-Phorm and an affiliate all at the same time?

Trading potatoes and sheep

Our economic system is built upon the notion of trading. Way back in history we would eat only what we foraged or hunted. Later we came up with agriculture and grew our own food. Then some bright spark came up with trading. I grow potatoes, you rear sheep. I exchange something I have for something you have. We agree on a price which is acceptable to both of us and a trade is made.

Google provides free web search but they still need to pay their staff. What am I prepared to trade in order to get access to that site? My attention, my time and my interests have a value. An advertiser will pay for targeted access to my attention for the time that I’m using Google. That’s the trade that we make in order for me to get access to free search, email and so forth.

Similarly, a supermarket shopper can sign up for a reward card to collect points and get discounts. This involves handing over some personal details about your shopping habits in return for those discounts. Personally, I don’t have rewards cards but a lot of people do. To them, that personal information is worth the value of the discounts they’ll get. To me, my privacy is more valuable and I’m not going to make that trade. That’s the choice we make.

Trust

Phorm want your personal browsing history to sell to advertisers as a profile. Your browsing history has a value to them. Would you let them have it? Maybe if you trusted them and got something good in return you would. But Phorm have a history of distributing spyware and the ISPs have been less than transparent about how the system will work. Can you trust them with your info? You might trust a supermarket chain with details of your shopping but would you trust them if they started telling your doctor how often you bought booze or your wife when you bought condoms?

There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of Phorm and frankly they’re offering me nothing in return, certainly nothing to the value I place on the private data they want from me.

Afilliates

And what about affiliates? Yes, we make use of tracking cookies to enable our business and, no, a lot of the time our visitors aren’t aware that this is happening. The difference is how we use tracking cookies. We are not building a browsing history. We aren’t identifying a single user visiting multiple sites. We don’t set cookies that last for years. We’re just using them to track the success of our referrals and to claim the reward we are due for introducing the customer and the merchant. I’m happy that the use of cookies in affiliate marketing is above board. A website visitor can always set their browser to reject third party cookies or clear out their cookies at the end of a session if it suits them.

Profiling based on browsing history is a lucrative business but it’s also very difficult to do it correctly on an anonymous basis. When AOL released anonymized search history for their users back in 2006 it very quickly became apparent that individuals could be identified from the history of terms they searched for. We don’t know that we can trust Phorm with that data, we derive no benefit from them having it and we should err on the side of caution and resist this invasion of our privacy.

Whether they’re the chocolate kind or the internet kind, cookies are great.

When I was at school a million years ago the most popular kid in the playground was the one who brought the packet of mini chocolate cookies for a break time snack. Don’t ask me why but it was always more satisfying to scrounge a cookie than a handful of Wotsits, Square crisps or Snaps.

Here in the internet age cookies have acquired a new meaning. They’re the little snippets of data a website sends to your browser so it can recognise you when you come back again. They’re essential to affiliate marketing. When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link they receive a cookie from the merchant’s website and then, if they buy something, the merchant uses the cookie data to know which affiliate they should be paying.

The best thing about cookies is that they don’t go away if the visitor doesn’t buy straight away. It stays in the browser and most merchants will pay out if the visitor comes back to buy something at a later date (generally up to 30 days). I’ve been discovering in the last couple of days just how good this can be. I’ve had several sales now where the actual transaction took place weeks after the visitor originally clicked my link. It means that the long barren period earlier in the month where I was making virtually nothing isn’t as bad as it seemed. It also shows that you shouldn’t write off an idea too soon. The customer might have bookmarked the offer to return to after payday.

There are a couple of complications after all nothing is ever simple. Firstly, merchants only pay out for the last affiliate to refer a customer. Kirsty explains it well in her post here so I won’t bother repeating it.

Secondly, some people don’t like the idea of being tracked on the internet so they’ll set their browser to reject cookies or to delete them when they log off.

Third,  some merchants don’t set tracking cookies at all so you only get one chance at converting. Amazon, I believe, are notable for not setting cookies.

I like cookies and I’ll be paying closer attention in future to merchants’ cookie policies. It also backs up my idea that it’s better to concentrate on more niche products from smaller merchants as it’s more likely that the cookie-carrying visitor will return to the same site to complete their purchase.