Spam and affiliate marketing

People will do what you incent them to do. This is a basic rule of human behavior that has, sadly, often been misapplied. For some examples, ask anyone who’s involved in sales and marketing about whether their compensation plan rewards desirable behavior.
Affiliate marketing programs, like the one offered by Amazon.com, seem like a great idea: corporations can get others to do their marketing work for them. The only problem is, these programs typically incent affiliates purely by sales numbers, so guess what? Unscrupulous affiliates will do all sorts of things to get their volumes up.
Take Vonage, for instance. They offer a flat $50 commission for each new subscriber. It’s not surprising, then, that I got spam this morning from a Vonage affiliate. Sure, the spam violates the affiliate terms of service, but so what? That violation is meaningless unless Vonage kicks the offender out without paying them. I’ve already called Vonage to complain; we’ll see what happens. My suspicion is that Vonage won’t care, as long as they’re getting the new customers.
Ever wonder why you’re getting so much spam for Symantec products like Norton Internet Security? Symantec says that it’s because people are selling pirated version of their software. I remember them having an affiliate program in the past, but I can’t find any details– perhaps the lazy web can help out here.
Amazon’s another example. If you google for any of a wide range of product names, you’re likely to find sponsored links from Amazon affiliates. Click the link, and you’re redirected to Amazon’s page via the affiliate, so they get credit if you buy anything. I don’t remember ever getting spam from Amazon affiliates, and since the affiliates have to pay for their Google text ads I don’t mind this approach as much.