[John Powell]

I have really taken Haiko's call to action to heart and have been trying to contact the powers to be for 4 merchants. It eats a lot of time and is frustrating just to make contact with all the voice mail crap people use now days.

There are so many merchants and the number of toolbar affiliates is growing. It seems like Wack-A-Mole, and I like others am trying to find a better way.

To me we need a slick presentation beyond anything that I've seen so far. Something that could be directed higher up on the food chain. To me dealing with networks and affiliate managers is a waste of time. They have a vested interest in leaving things as they are. Merchants are getting screwed and we have to show them where it hits the bottom line.

A presentation like Ben Edelman to me is way too technical for those in power. We have to wear a salesman's hat here instead of a professors robe.

In the end I believe that it will come down to affiliates that care aligning themselves with merchants that have been informed and get it. The rest will all go their own way for whatever reason unless the FTC does something.

Could we build a list of merchants that are not using software affiliates. Make a small site around that theme and give them a positive title like Anti-toolbar Merchants List (something better surely). It would be easy to build a starter list from SAS and AvantLink.

You could possibly give them a status like "Reviewing Documentation" after getting the quality presentation to them. If they publicly reject then we could call for mass abandonment by affiliates. I could dump a couple a month, but wouldn't want to remove all of a network at once.

I'm rambling here but it might stimulate ideas, and we seem to need all that we can get.

[purplebear]

Don't know bout all the details, but I think it's a great idea.

"I could dump a couple a month, but wouldn't want to remove all of a network at once."

Agree, not sure how it's gonna be able to be done, don't have time to do before then but after the holidays am gonna sit down and really try to analyze things and try to figure out how to change what am doin now.

"To me dealing with networks and affiliate managers is a waste of time."
Agree, not happy with results either