GreenguyandJim Fighting Zango

[cd34]

While I am reasonably sure that Zango has the programming capabilities to do an auto-update, I wonder what the long term effect is. Its possible that new generations have a different identifier and older generations still bear the Zango tag.

Here's the cynical view I see of Zango.

Affiliates push a sponsor, Zango skims that sponsor and takes a % for themselves. Affiliate leaves sponsor because conversions suck. Zango no longer has anything to skim.

The long term model only works when Zango (or any scumware vendor) is able to skim traffic filtered enough to go to paying locations. It doesn't make sense for zango to pop an advertisement for Hawaiian Air when someone is surfing a site on pet adoption. Which means that they need to do context sniffing to present reasonable ads. Right now, they can target simple URL strings which doesn't require much computing power or intelligence.

If everyone knew that SponsorA was buying clicks to advertise above SponsorB, and everyone stopped advertising SponsorB because of lower conversions, it seems that somewhere along the line, SponsorA, Zango, SponsorB and the affiliate lose out.

A sponsor that is being Zangoed, sees the same number of signups, the same relative payout -- just that the distribution to the affiliates has changed.

The problem I have with most of the tried and true detection systems is that to detect scumware, you almost have to be scumware. As for zango displaying a message on top of adwaresucks.com, it just shows that they are scared that people might learn what has been installed on their machines.