Last week one of my friends got banned by an affiliate network for being found promoting their offer on a porn website.  He was very shocked and felt innocent as he never ran any campaigns targeting toward porn sites.  The only traffic source that he had used to promote that offer was LeadImpact.  So he contacted LeadImpact asking how this could happen.  What he learned from LeadImpact is quite disturbing.  LeadImpact was testing a new technology that allows them to search within the content of a webpage to find matches to keywords.  They were testing the top 10,000 keywords used in their network; and “credit*cards”, a keyword my friend had used, is one of them.  According to the Leadimpact’s explanation, the situation might be that one of Leadimpact users was paying for services on a porn site, and so the words “credit*card” probably showed up somewhere on the webpage, triggering a popup of my friend’s ad at a porn site.

This is completely unethical!  LeadImpact were essentially using publishers as guinea pig to test their new technology and traffic.  They did this even without notifying us.  They ran the experiments at the publishers’ cost and put publisher’s affiliate accounts at risk.  Actually, I have learned from several other people that last week they all experienced a huge drop in quality from the LeadImpact traffic in relation to credit card campaigns.  Their used-to-be profitable campaigns suddenly turned into bleeding – losing a huge amount of money.  It is quite a shame that LeadImpact used affiliates’ money to do their own test without asking first.  At the very least, they should send out a notification, informing people what the test is and what potential risks could be.

Any lesson from this incident?  If you have been running some profitable campaigns on LeadImpact, you should write to ask them to remove your account from their test, and indicate that they are doing the wrong thing to put publishers’ accounts and campaigns in jeopardy.