The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Tradedoubler Ddos

Affiliate Window offers publishers compensation for network disruption caused by hackers

Author

By Jessica Davies, News Editor

July 24, 2014 | 4 min read

Publishers have welcomed Affiliate Window’s decision to offer them compensation for any potential revenue loss during a recent outage when hackers attacked the network.

The affiliate network revealed its intentions to reimburse affiliate publishers for any revenue loss earlier this week, having been hit by an aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a few weeks ago.

Affiliate Window's client services director Anthony Clements alerted partners to its intentions to the “malicious attempt” from hackers to disrupt the network in a blog post this week.

The move has marked an “unprecedented problem” in its history, according to Clements.

He said in the blog: “The malicious traffic volumes were far in excess of the network’s normal operating parameters and as a result there was disruption to our services.

"Although we have clearly been the victims of a malicious attempt to cause disruption to the network, this does not change the fact that our users were significantly inconvenienced by the disruption. Because of this we would like to offer compensation to all publishers that might have been affected."

Both Affiliate Window and rival network Tradedoubler were targeted by hackers a few weeks ago, within days of each other, leaving some to speculate that the same hacker or hacker group was responsible for both offences.

The outages were resolved quickly, with the result that affiliate campaigns would have been suspended intermittently, rather than continuously. As a result Affiliate Window has pledged to calculate the compensation by looking at the performance of each publisher during a comparable operating period. Those publishers which are deemed to have lost out will then be compensated accordingly.

The move has been welcomed by affiliate publishers as a good will gesture.

Vouchercodes.co.uk senior director, partner management Evelyn McKinnon, said: “One of the most important elements in our relationship with our network partners is our reliance on them delivering a consistent quality of tracking. Anything occurring on the scale of this DDoS attack is therefore a big concern and brings home the importance of having robust disaster planning solutions in place across the industry.

“Nonetheless, we have been impressed by the level of transparency that Affiliate Window have offered following these events and welcome the proactive precedent they’ve created in their compensation of publishers.”

TopCashback commercial director James Little said: “It will no doubt be welcome news for the industry. They didn’t have to do it, there is nothing in their terms and conditions which says they need to, it’s a great good will gesture.”

It is unclear who is responsible for the attacks, although DigitasLBi’s media innovation director Andy Girdwood said the attacks could be a form of extortion. He described DDoS as “brute force” attempts to disrupt services, in which the perpetrator can demand money in return for ceasing the attacks, yet which companies can fight off if they are strong enough.

“Tradedoubler got hit quite hard and was off and on for over a week – the effect of these DDoS attacks means campaigns are suspended. This is a big bunch of business, it can have serious knock-on effect to affiliate revenue,” he said.

Last month attention was drawn to a major DDoS attack on Feedly, with the brand receiving multiple attacks over a few weeks.

Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest performance-driven marketing channels, with £814m spent in the UK on affiliate marketing and lead generation in 2012, which generated £9bn in sales, according to the IAB.

Tradedoubler was unavailable for comment at the time of this article's publication.

Tradedoubler Ddos

Content created with:

Affiliate Window

Find out more

More from Tradedoubler

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +