The gist of the complaint is a bit complicated to explain, but goes like this:

1. Unscrupulous CJ affiliate publisher A produces a “free toolbar” as a browser add-on;
2. Innocent Joe Public installs the “free toolbar”;
3. Joe visits the website of honest CJ affiliate publisher B, decides he wants to buy something, and clicks on a CJ affiliate link;
4. The “free toolbar” produced by A intervenes and rewrites the message sent by the click, substituting A’s affiliate details for B’s;
5. CJ credits A, not B, for the purchase.

The action was brought against CJ for failing to take effective action against click fraud of this kind. There have been numerous allegations on the Web that CJ can’t be bothered with small affiliate publishers because they cost too much money to administer (what on earth could have given rise to those allegations, we wonder?) and have been quite happy to turn a blind eye to the adware pirates because it means paying out large amounts to a few people instead of small ones to several more.

Anyway, the latest news is that there’s now a provisional settlement in the case. CJ have denied liability (well, they would, wouldn’t they?) but have nevertheless agreed to undergo an independent audit of their efforts to prevent, detect and respond to adware abuse of their system, and to improve their Network Quality setup. (That’s big of them.)

They’ve also agreed to pay into a settlement fund worth $1 million, to be divided 70:30 between publishers and merchants. The publisher fund is to be divided pro rata among CJ affiliates determined by their percentage of total commission earnings between 20 April 2003 and 22 July 2008 – so if you’d earned 1% of the total commission paid out by CJ in that time, you’d be paid $7,000. But they’re only going to pay out awards of $1 or larger – publishers whose award would be smaller than that will be excluded from the process, and the remaining funds will be divided up pro rata amongst the larger ones.

And, of course, CJ get let off the hook – Class Members are deemed to have released CJ from any further liability in regard of click fraud complaints of this kind.

(You can read more details about the settlement – and how to exclude yourself from the class action, or object to the settlement terms – at the website set up specifically by CJ for the purpose: http://www.cjsettlement.com/)

Not much reason to cheer from the money point of view, for most of us. We at CJ Sucks! can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to the people whose commission earnings were inflated by click fraud – are they going to get a share of the payout too? And what about all the many people whose payments were swallowed up by CJ’s confiscatory policy of penalising those who earn less than whatever arbitrary minimum figure CJ happened to have set at the time? Erm, they just have to live with it – they can’t even grumble about it, because under the settlement they’re gagged…

Still, if the publicity makes would-be merchants a bit more chary of advertising through CJ in future, then at least something’s been achieved…

Several ex-CJ affiliates have reported on the internet that when they did just that, CJ accused them of cheating and booted them off the programme.

Nice people…

Our records indicate that your account has been deactivated.

No warning or anything. I’m glad I removed all their links a while back otherwise I might still have been giving their merchants loads of free advertising with no hope of any benefit to my site.

CJ truly does suck.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum20/11547.htm

See also:

A guy spends loads on PPC then CJ has an “outage”. More reporting problems:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum20/4031.htm

We’re not the only ones to be pissed off with Commission Junction.

However, we are totally sick of CJ and don’t believe they pay all the commissions they should. For example, we know of cases where friends and family have bought using our links but we have never been credited for it.

I was discussing this with one of my pals and he said that his best selling merchant had changed over to CJ recently and that his income had fallen drastically as a result. More than a coincidence we think.

The trouble is that several of the big names I want to promote are also on CJ. I’m missing out on a few large and financially lucrative markets because I won’t promote anything via CJ any more. (Part of me wonders if getting 40% of something is better than 100% of nothing, but on principle I don’t want to do business with people I distrust.)

Anyone else in the same boat?

Some months back, this merchant moved from their in-house affiliate scheme to CJ. Around the same time, my site finally came out of the Google sandbox and shot from not being in the first 1,000 results to now ranking position 5 for my keywords. Despite the resultant large hike in traffic to my site, my earnings for this merchant have dropped to a third of their previous level.

It seems we’re totally at the mercy of CJ, so I guess there’s little we can do about it. I did e-mail CJ but, of course, have not received a reply or acknowledgement.

I’ll be contacting the merchant to tell them of my experience and urge them to return to their previous scheme. I won’t be holding my breath though.

Alan