Has anyone bought a new computer recently? If so, have you noticed that they come with links to ebay on the desktop? I recently bought 2. HP Pav Notebook Toshiba Qosmio Notebook Both have these types of quick links on the desktop. Now I use several different affiliate programs as do most of you, so Affiliate Links are easy to spot. If you click on the ooohhh...let's say EBAY icon on your desktop, and watch the address bar, you'll see that it takes you through a hidden affiliate id to Ebay. (There are more, I just used ebay as one example because it is so well known.) If this is standard on all new pcs, I'm guessing someone is raking in billions of dollars per year just from these convenience clicks. The question is who? Personally I feel it's cheating and not fair to the rest of the webmasters out there who work their asses off and reinvest their hard earned money into advertising and upkeep of their domains just to get by. I was just wondering if anyone else had noticed this.
Well I never notice that, and I seriously doubt this comes with the Microsoft OS or from HP or Toshiba. They are far too big and powerful to need some little pocket money from affiliate links. I would think that maybe some vendors install these into the computers or laptops they sold. Smart guys but not that ethical I would feel. I would suggest that you complain to HP and Toshiba respectively. Such errant vendors need to be punished.
I think if you contact the affiliate manager of the merchants, they should ban the computer vendors from their affiliate programmes.
I think Toshiba and HP may even revoke their retailer/reseller status, this is an obvious breach of trust and integrity. Do as xenyo propose too. Get such unethical vendors out of business.
I plan on tracking down the Affiliate account manager as well as Toshiba and HP today. That should be interesting. Is this isolated, or has anyone else noticed this?
Could it have caught some viruses or malware somewhere? Best Buy is no small outfit, very unlikely that they would resort to this.
I echo that. Run some system checks with Spybot,and AVG Free,and or any other good anti virus/spyware programs.
Well, since the computers are new, running Vista, and haven't really been used, I think I'll just do a system recovery. It's simple and from experience, Vista runs seems to run better after doing this. Regarding the links: I spoke to a CJ rep, then emailed the details of the links and they are reviewing them. Although I'll never know, it would we interesting to find out how much this affiliate has made from these links.
i think microsoft started this trend when they started putting MSN icon on the desktop (i think it was way back on Win98). even tho MSN is owned by MS, it is still advertisement and a pitch to users signing up with microsoft's own ISP. others now are just following