Shadows In Motion

a deep thoughts & spiritual musings Blog

Despite the fact that the Firefox browser ships with affiliate plugins, the ones that you submit may be deleted from their database.

Today I discovered that every one of my search plugins had been deleted from the official MyCroft Mozilla / Firefox search plugin database. So I went about the process of updating every one of them and uploading them back to their database. My assumption was that they were originally removed because MyCroft has switched how they handle the auto update URLs. This was annoying, but easily worked around.

To my surprise I received an email from MyCroft saying that they had just deleted one of the plugins that I uploaded to their server. The reason? It’s an affiliate plugin that uses LinkShare.

So what exactly does this mean? When you install Firefox it comes pre-installed with affiliate boxes for Amazon.com and eBay. Mozilla automatically receives a commission payment when you buy something from one of these services after using these search boxes. I have no problem with that.

What raises a flag for me is that they are now blocking other affiliate plugins. Want to do the exact same thing that they’re doing? Too bad.

I sent an email their way inquiring why my plugin was deleted whilst they personally use affiliate search boxes. I’m still awaiting their response.

If nothing else I’m expecting a canned response about privacy. This is nonsense. In my original eMail I told MyCroft that you can’t so much as see which items were ordered via the LinkShare affiliate program. I have since discovered that that’s not true.

In fact, both affiliate programs show the exact same statistics. Here is an example from LinkShare:

As you can see, I don’t exactly make a killing off of this. That’s not even $20, and this is a good month for me. There are times that I get nothing, or even just $1 (seriously)!

Amazon.com shows the exact same type of information. Both programs will show which items were sold and how many of those items were sold. In both cases, no personally identifiable information is ever revealed. It’s pure, raw statistics.

Both programs gather the same information. Saying that one is of more concern than the other is nonsense. So if affiliate search boxes uploaded by end-users is a privacy concern, then their own affiliate plugins are of equal concern. Yet they seem to have no problem with their own affiliate links. Hmmm..

Of course, I’ve received no official response from them yet. I’m speculating about their reasons at this point. Are they going to try to use the privacy concern approach, or will they have other reasons?

I am very curious to read why the Firefox folks are targetting specific affiliate programs, especially when they use very similar systems themselves.

In any case, if you rely on affiliate Firefox search plugins to generate a bit of income then you should make sure that they’re still available. As for me, I’ll probably begin hosting them on my own server.

~Mysk