[GlobalGolf-Amanda]

Found this little gem at http://www.hitwise.com/news/us200710.html#body_second:

Choosing Affiliate Partners by Identifying Sources of Traffic to Your Competitor’s Website
By using Hitwise to chart upstream traffic to your competitors' websites, you can view the most popular websites that send visitors to your competitors, but not to you. For example, assume one of your competitors is walmart.com. Using Hitwise Clickstream reports, you can determine that among the most popular Rewards and Directory websites, traffic from Upromise.com is growing at the fastest rate, and brands you should consider partnering with include Nextag and Ebates. You can use this insight to determine the best partners for driving traffic to your website.

[ReneeO]

I wouldn't consider this "taking advantage of unknowing AM's/Merchants." Hitwise is an extremely helpful tool... for this reason, as well as finding market trends to & from your site and for finding industry leaders by market based on market share.

[GlobalGolf-Amanda]

Renee,
I agree, Hitwise can be extremely useful, but it seems to me they are encouraging partnering with any affiliate that has the capability to drive traffic to your competitors. A merchant who knows nothing about eBates or UPromise may be more apt to jump aboard the money train and recruit these affiliates without much/any investigation.

[rematt]

Originally Posted by Renee - Celebrate Express

I wouldn't consider this "taking advantage of unknowing AM's/Merchants." Hitwise is an extremely helpful tool... for this reason, as well as finding market trends to & from your site and for finding industry leaders by market based on market share.

I agree they probably aren't knowingly taking advantage of the unknowing, but may better serve their clients by leaving the interpretation of the data to those more in the know. Know what I mean?

-rematt

[Chuck Hamrick]

Unenlightened AM's who partner with eBates or UPromise are going to do it anyway. It takes a big merchant to afford HitWise with a sticker price of $50 to 75k per year. The best thing that could happens when they find a clean affiliate is for that affiliate to check eBates or UPromise for the merchant then decline to work with them. It might get the merchant/AM to become educated about parasites. That's what happened to me!