[Chuck Hamrick]

Do we have reason to cheer or is it a false alarm?

My bad, I missed that the first time!

[Nabz]

Ebates may direct your traffic to the merchant of your choice. This may be done a)by presenting a choice in a pop up alert asking whether you wish to save by shopping through Ebates, thereby directing your browser through Ebates in order to ensure you earn a reward, or b)by automatically routing you through Ebates and automatically earning you a cash-back discount with no further action on your part being necessary.

If I refer someone to ebay.com and that visitor have ebates installed, It will overright the cookies by redirecting the visit. Damn, Why do merchants join hands with suck crooks ?

[Teesed]

OK, I just got the word that Zazzle is in eBates. I'm crafting an email to their AM and looking for something to direct them to regarding eBates and parasite activity.

I've looked all over and can't find a toolbar to download on their site. I searched the web for the "Moe Money Maker" toolbar and only found reference on spyware sites, etc, but no place to download it.

I followed the link http://www.ebates.com/help/moe_money_maker.htm#20 posted by MichaelColey above that apparently WAS about how to download it, but now is about how to uninstall it. It also says a new and better thing is coming, but I can't find that or what date this was.

Someone posted in another thread from months ago that the MMM info was in their About page, but I don't see it there either.

The #20 info in their T&C is still pretty much the same though, about the terms of using their toolbar.

So, is the MMM toolbar still in existence and supported/functional?

Is there something else in its place?

If not, what is the parasitic activity? I'm asking not only for myself, but so I can make the informed point to this AM, hopefully with examples.

[Haiko de Poel, Jr.]

Just logged into my account to look for the download, couldn't find it but I did find something VERY interesting ...

When I clicked on http://www.ebates.com/search/all.htm...zazzle&x=0&y=0

Look at what I found in the interstitial ...

GET /images/white1_1.png?ad=zazzle.com&traytext=10%25+Cash+Back+at+Zazzle+now+activated. HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.43 Safari/525.19
Referer: http://www.ebates.com/interstitialAc...s_id=204489234
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,bzip2,sdch
Cookie: bind_params_=ad%2Czazzle.com%23%23traytext%2C10%25%20Cash%20Back%20at%20Zazzle%20now%20activated.%23%23
Accept-Language: en-US,en
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,*,utf-8
Host: www freecause.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

[simcat]

I doesnt look like the mmm toolbar is available for download.
There is this, powered by conduit
http://ebates.ourtoolbar.com/

[Teesed]

freecause... nice... can you elaborate a little as to what that means?

Is that OneCause? FYI, I do have this directly from Zazzle on 12/8, and they did say I could repost it:

Jim,

Looks like OneCause was removed from our program on 11/21.

Regards,

Mike

[Teesed]

simcat, twould be nice to test that toolbar and see what it does. If it's something that you enter and search only, I don't have a problem with it. If it's something that notifies and overwrites, big problem obviously.

I'm using the in-house program at Z, which doesn't use cookies. Not exactly sure how that works, but I wouldn't be able to see if it was being overwritten. Might have to switch to the performics/GAN setup to test it.

[2busy]

Host: www freecause.com

Yikes! Looks like ebates has outsourced their dirty deeds. Freecause is the creator of OneCause, and other causes.

[Haiko de Poel, Jr.]

Right.

I guess I also now understand how Ebates got Freecause to replace them on our ethics panel in Vegas

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by simcat

I doesnt look like the mmm toolbar is available for download.
There is this, powered by conduit
http://ebates.ourtoolbar.com/

Yes, ourtoolbar.com is owned by Conduit.

Multiple toolbars for Ebates? One from Conduit and one from FreeCause?

[Haiko de Poel, Jr.]

We regret to inform you that we will discontinue support of the program software starting next week in preparation for the launch of an exciting new Ebates toolbar in the coming weeks. The new, cutting-edge toolbar will provide a superior customer experience and better access to personalized special offers without actually being downloaded to your computer. As soon as the toolbar is ready for use, you will be among the first to know. Source

I can tell you that the Conduit iteration is NOT the exciting new toolbar, I'll betya it's a freecause iteration. The benefit of all the parasites (for them) using the same technology is to control the overwriting that happens with multiple toolbar installs. The problems in doing that is however, are multiple, legally and get this "ethically" I had already seen a link being overwritten by Onecause and then apparently rewritten by freecause, now I fully understand why it happened.

[Haiko de Poel, Jr.]

Just had a quick conversation with Kevin Johnson (new CEO) of eBates who confirmed that the Moe Money Maker has been completely deactivated and that they are not even close to releasing a new toolbar right now.

--------
Yes the conduit toolbar is out there but that's a bookmark toolbar, not the traditional toolbar disclaimer added by me usng my own words.

Thanks for the call Kevin.

[Zeus]

What's happening? Are they starting a new trend? Great news.

[Teesed]

Thank you for checking into that. (do we have confirmation the toolbar no longer actually works?)

So without that, and until there's something else depending on what it is, would they be considered to be parasites, or just to have been a parasite?

If they aren't currently doing anything untoward, it would be kind of hard for an AM seeing their success to boot them and wouldn't have cause to do so.

If they've truly changed their stripes, that would be a nice sign.

[Corri M Coulter]

Yes - thanks so much for checking!

As an AM, I'm being pushed by some 'consultants' to get into either CJ or SAS because of folks like Ebates and UPromise. As the AM for a program back a few years (03 - 06), I made sure my company was not at all affiliated with Ebates.

If the tide really is changing, then I'll be stoked

Corri

[chetf]

Originally Posted by Haiko de Poel, Jr.

Just had a quick conversation with Kevin Johnson (new CEO) of eBates who confirmed that the Moe Money Maker has been completely deactivated and that they are not even close to releasing a new toolbar right now.

--------
Yes the conduit toolbar is out there but that's a bookmark toolbar, not the traditional toolbar disclaimer added by me usng my own words.

Thanks for the call Kevin.

Oh noes! But CJ and ebates were saving shoppers and empowering them! Moe Money Maker was flawless and the perfect toolbar, THE INTERNETS ARE GOING TO BREAK DOWN WITHOUT THEM!

[Chris - AMWSO]

Perhaps it's part of an experiment to see for themselves where there traffic really comes from, or gradual feedback from users, and the blockage by various AV software has led them to decide that site based marketing rather than toolbar based marketing is the way forwards. Everyone and their dog can have a tool bar today. Perhaps Ebay is daring to be different and not add more clutter to already over bloated browsers.

Would be great to hear from Kevin Johnson on ABW what his plans are for Ebates.

Cheers

Chris