Shawn Hogan comes clean on allegations of cookie stuffing. If you have not be following this story then I will start with back in August 25, 2008 a summons was issued to defendants Shawn Hogan, Brian Dunning and Kevin Dunning on August 26, 2008. Shawn Hogan owner of Digital Point forums was brought up on charges filed by eBay for cookie stuffing. At that point in time Shawn Hogan was eBay’s top affiliate partner. He was making upwards to a million a month with eBay’s Google affiliate program.
Cookie stuffing is when you visit a website and a third-party cookie is download onto your computer without your knowledge. The cookie would actually be an affiliate link, so when people go and buy from the affiliate website the one cookie stuffing would collect that revenue. This is not only unethical but illegal as well.
Yesterday Shawn posted on his blog at Digital Point Forums What Does Carmen Electra, Cyber-Terrorism and Meg Whitman Have In Common? eBay!
Shawn gives the whole story of his relationship with eBay from the beginning.
I got the attention of eBay because my affiliate income was going crazy and they assigned someone to be my “go to” person for anything I needed within the eBay program. This person was assigned to me in early 2005.
Spring 2005
At this time, the eBay contact that was assigned to me was constantly complaining about how they need to get a new car because their car was crappy. I finally got tired of continuously hearing about their crappy car and promised that I would buy them a new car if I ever made over $1M/month, but they could never talk about their car again starting now. I honestly never thought I would make anywhere remotely close to $1M/month at this point, so it was an easy way just to get them to shut up about their car.
Summer 2005
At this point, things started to seem strange to me. eBay was paying affiliates millions per month, when they had no competition… for the most part it was traffic they would receive anyway. And why was eBay *happy* (and they were) that I was outranking them for their own company name and paying me for it? Someone searched Google for “eBay”, came to my site and I would send them to ebay.com to get affiliate revenue. Finally I confronted eBay about it all. I told them numerous times that I didn’t understand even why they HAD an affiliate program, and that I would gladly do what I do for them for 1% of what they were paying me. The response I was met with with ultimately was (and I quote), “Well don’t tell anyone that. Why do you not like ‘Free money’?”
Spring 2006
I proceeded to inform eBay that I no longer wanted to participate in the eBay affiliate program… but every time I brought this up with them (which was every time I talked to them at this point), I was guilted into staying, with them asking me to stay “one more month” or “can you just wait until the end of the quarter so it doesn’t wreck our numbers?”. Finally I REALLY wanted to be done and not strung along anymore and again was guilted into staying with them telling me how many hours they spent getting me a “special rate”, etc, etc. and now it would all be for nothing if I was going to quit.
eBay Live! – June 2006
Yeah, no. eBay asking me to engage in cyber-terrorism against Google… thanks, but no thanks. I’m not going down that road.
Carmen Electra & The Super Bowl
I don’t recall the exact time, but I believe it was in the fall of 2006. I showed up on Ben Edelman’s monthly compliance report again, and this time he was absolutely furious with eBay employees about it. What *I* heard is that during the conference call with the eBay affiliate managers, he did a lot of yelling and screaming about why I was still participating in the eBay affiliate program when I should have been terminated last time I showed up on his report.
eBay’s response to him? “We’ll take care of it.”
June 2007
In June of 2007, my affiliation with eBay ended. And truthfully, I was very happy about it (in the previous year, nearly every communication I had with eBay, I would bring up the fact I didn’t want to participate in the eBay affiliate program any longer), so it was an easy way out without them begging/pleading that I stay in the program “just a little longer”.
A reoccurring theme throughout the blog post was Shawn claimed he was begged by ebay to stay on even though, it was in Ebay’s best interest to let Shawn go because affiliate revenue is an add expense to a business. His explanation was Ebay wants to take down Google at all costs.
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