Guys I just got off the phone with Shelly and Brian from 888. They are REALLY trying their best to assist us in finding a solution to this situation. The issue is that affiliates of Tradal are the ones practicing scraping and they are NOT employees of 888 or even Tradal.
The only smoking guns are ones which have been readily admitted all along. Yes, there are affiliates using scraping. 888 is aware of this and does NOT support that practice. They have stated over and over that they will and do SUSPEND any affiliate account that does Scraping or content theft.
They have made a firm committment that whenever we supply an affiliate ID thats associated with this type of behavior they will verify that the affiliate is doing this and then suspend that affiliate and retain their commissions.
This certainly seems reasonable and proactive to me.
Furthermore they DO own thousands of gambling related domains. This is not uncommon. I personally own thousands of domains too, as do many of you. There is nothing sinister about this.
Establishing that there are ties between Tradal and 888 is also no great discovery. Everyone knows that Tradal has been a super affiliate of the Casino On Net brand since they opened the doors. Tradal also generates more revenue than all their other affiliates combined by a very wide margin, so its nieve to think that 888 is about to abandon that business relationship.
Guys I think it’s best to work WITH 888 to get rid of these scrapers. Alienating the program and creating a hostile enviroment where they cant even get in a word in edgewise with us is NOT going to help solve anything. You are just going to create a wall that makes cooperation difficult if not impossible.
I know everyone loves to have a cause to rally around. And Scraping is a VERY serious issue that HAS to be resolved. I just think the best way to beat this thing is by removing the profit to the scrapers. By working WITH the programs we can do this. If you just shut the casino(s) off from the mainstream affiliate community the only people they will have left to work with will be the scrapers and black hatters and the problem will only get worse.
EVERY problem we have ever solved at CAP has come through cooperation. This is too serious a threat to abandon an approach with proven results.
Shelly is one of the good “guys” lets work with her to get over this hurdle.
They are going to get back to us in 24 to 48 hours with a detailed action list of what’s being done to help us stamp out scraping. Lets hold off with the rotten egg and tomato throwing for awhile please until we see what they have to offer.