Greetings! It’s been a while since I posted to this blog, so I felt it was high time I did, and in fact I’ve had something on my mind the last couple of days, and I needed to write about it.

It’s about the Internet Marketing phenomenon that I call the Affiliate Link “Sidestep”.
Basically it’s the process where you have advertised about a product and provided some information and an affiliate link for your list members to click on and hopefully purchase from you.
Now much has been said about the process of people STEALING your sales by hijacking your affiliate link, but this isn’t what I’m talking about.
This is about people taking what information you provide and searching for the product site themselves, or another way would be to try and remove your affiliate information and using the main part of the url.

Someone might say that they aren’t exactly “stealing” your sale proceeds, but in avoiding the use of your affiliate link to access the site or product, they are taking away from you that sale potential. In my book that’s pretty darn close to stealing!

The question I have about this is WHY?

So I’m hoping that by writing about it, or perhaps from someone providing a comment with some insight into this, I might finally understand this very curious and disturbing aspect of human nature.

First off in understanding the motivation of an act, one might best understand the consequences or outcome of that act. I would have to say that people ”sidestep” affiliate links on purpose. This isn’t an accidental “oops” I messed up and forgot something. They have to actively avoid the affiliate url and either use a search engine query, or edit the affiliate portion off the url leaving the site address.
In doing so the “perpetrator” avoids being tagged with any cookie indentifying them as being referred to the site by the “victim”, and if they purchase the product the “victim” will not receive any commissions for that sale.

This, I believe, is the intent of the act. To deprive the affiliate of their due commission. Understanding that, we can then take a clear look at the “perp” in the clear light of reason to see if we can possibly understand the motivation.

Just so we’re clear, in an act such as sidestepping an affiliate link, it would follow that the company selling the product would recieve 100% of the sale price, and so there’s no overtly obvious benefit to the “perp” in cutting out the affiliate. They don’t get a price discount, commission or kickback.
So without obvious benefit, it follows that the benefit is internal and not so obvious to our eyes, but perhaps our minds can discern the motive.

So before I prejudice any of your answers with my own comments, I will wait to see what you have to say, and finally when I feel it’s time I will have my say about why I think people choose to do this.