Clickbank - Someone Stealing Commissions?

Most bloggers today and internet marketers (Affiliate Marketers) use Clickbank, Commission Junction, and a host of other intermediary service providers to enable the marketers and bloggers to advertise a product and get paid. The way it works is a blogger writes an article or creates a page on his or her website, then either puts an ad on the site, or a link within the body of the post advertising the product. If that ad or link gets clicked on, then the blogger will get paid a commission if there is a sale.

I have used both Clickbank and Commission Junction. The interesting thing is that while I get clicks, I've never once gotten a sale. I never paid much attention to it since neither of those sites were very high on my list of marketing arms.

But recently, I began to wonder. 

First, I read an article somewhere about some guys who were literally stealing the commissions. It's way over my head, very "black hat" stuff, but apparently, it is doable. Not sure how, but it is being done. Second, I began to look at the stats and realized that there was a statistical probability that this was happening to me. Third, I discovered, inadvertently, that there were entities/producers of products, mostly digital ebooks, who were somehow gaming the system. You'd make a sale, but it never was registered as a sale. Somehow they are able to keep the sale off the Clickbank radar.

Maybe it's time to start rethinking the system. For me, I think I'll be pulling any Clickbank ads I have remaining. I'm way to busy to try and track it and find out who's doing what. Isn't worth it to me, frankly. But, I'll be looking closer at all of them I use, as well.

The best one so far is Google's Adsense, with a close runner up being Amazon. They're pretty straightup and I've not heard of anyone gaming the system. Probably being done. I just haven't heard of it, and have not experienced any problems.

I'm hoping that Clickbank and the others who have such a power position in the internet marketing arena will one day work closer to the Google and Amazon model. Otherwise, I'm convinced they're going to keep on losing advertisers like myself, which is no big loss in just myself, but multiply those like me by 100,000 and you have significant numbers leaving the ship.