ReveNews.com - CJ Profits from Ezula's Hijacked Links (Aug. 16/01)
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cJ Profits from ezula's hijacked links By Brian Clark
August 16, 2001
Ezula's controversial software TopText (also called "ContextPro"),
which overlays paid hyperlinks on top of other people's webpages in a manner
quite similar to Microsoft's abandoned SmartTags feature, has raised the ire
of many webmasters. Most recently, phrases related to finances and loans started
turning up in TopText pointing to Premier Equity, a noted Commission Junction
merchant with a quite high EPC rating. While CJ "cannot disclose whether
a company is using its service without their consent", CJ's cookies are
all over the deal, and they were willing to defend the idea that they would
(hypothetically, of course) work with a company like them. Welcome to a new
darker face of affiliate marketing.
Let's start at the beginning. TopText (which piggybacks on popular downloads
like the MP3 trading tool KaaZa, which recieves 750,000 downloads a day) sells
clicks to merchants and advertisers and, apparantly, also participates in performance
deals. In these examples that follow (all under an unknown payment model), TopText
is overlaying links to Premier Equity linked around phrases relating to loans
and finance. This first screen capture is from a book search on noted merchant
Amazon.com, where two book title links are partially hijacked by the TopText
overlay:
