Yesterday we reported that Bit.ly and Viglink were adding their own affiliate cookies to links that are shortened through the URL shortener Bit.ly. And understandably, people are pretty upset about it, not just for the cookie dropping on unsuspecting users, but also because of the high likelihood that affiliate commissions could be hijacked when anyone uses a Bit.ly link.
First, this IS retroactive, so old affiliate links are being affected, it isn’t simply newly created links this is happening to.
If you are a merchant, you can contact your account rep at Viglink to opt out. “Then, ‘in theory’, none of the links will go through the affiliate channel,” said one affiliate, who prefers to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, and who has done exactly this.
However, if you do this, you will still need to keep an eye on it, because Viglink can make “mistakes” and forget from time to time, according to the affiliate.
“We theoretically opted out,” says the affiliate, “but found a bit.ly link our social team used redirecting through the affiliate channel.”
So bottom line, you can opt out by contacting your rep, but you will need to be super vigilant that Viglink doesn’t somehow forget or lose the opt-out and you discover commissions have been hijacked by Bit.ly.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020
Joseph Samuel says
I’ve been using Viglink for a long time and over the last few months, it has been a terrible experience. My clicks have been underreported immensely (& yes, these are the clicks that Viglink shortens through Bitly). Additionally, Viglink has been having these “monthly updates” where they re-report the revenue for the month. For April, my revenue ended up dropping by more than 50% (the previous months were also terrible). Prior to all of this seemingly shady business, my return rate was around 10-15%. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Bitly deal. Can Bitly be taking credit for the clicks my blog drives?
I’ve previously caught incorrect reporting of revenue (meaning, purchases not being reported) but Viglink just sends it off to be “checked” by Linkshare and that takes months so by the time they get an “answer” (and the answer is always an ambitious sentence with zero meaning), you’ve already caught so many other inaccuracies that you have forgotten what the “answer” is even for. My blog is my full time job right now and Viglink is completely letting me down. These past few months have been devastating. When is the FTC going to start creating strong regulations for affiliate marketing? Right now, the big winners are the merchants, Linkshare, and Viglink. The losers are the publishers (aka us), because we are completely blinded and have zero control as to what is going on behind the scenes. There is ZERO transparency.
I really believe all the big players are being incredibly short sited. Once you alienate the publishers, the publishers will move to other businesses or even start selling their own products directly to their followers. The merchants whose businesses have been thriving off of affiliate marketing will go downhill and then so will these affiliate companies (Viglink, Skimlink, Linkshare, RStyle).