Two things…

1) THANKS for talking about our comic! Adam Perry is actually the cartoonist and I just wanted to make sure he's given some cred.

2) Our company continues to do affiliate marketing, but we're doing it in many cases without involving a network for reasons similar to those that Wayne and Linda talk about.

I would encourage high volume affiliate marketers to contact advertisers directly and set up data feeds. If you're going to do enough volume, they will talk to you and many have systems set up already. By doing this, you KNOW for a FACT that you're being credited for the leads you generate because they are in your database as well.

Now, I understand this doesn't apply for many of the retail type programs… but someone will figure it out. They always do.

I agree and hope most people won't use incognito on a regular basis.

However cookies ARE needed to track a large majority of affiliate sales. I think you mainly work in the CPA space with free offers and leads. In those cases people usually follow through on the spot because it's free and there is no real buying decision to be made.

But with regular retail affiliate programs like you find on CJ, Linkshare and GAN – which is what the bigger majority of affiliates promote – cookies are a definite issue. People often shop and compare, for days or even weeks.

The higher ticket the item and the more complicated the product the longer the buy cycle tends to be. For instance computers and electronics can take a long time for people to finally make a purchase decision and buy.

Lately I've been buying some nutritional supplements and I'll research for a few nights before I decide which type, brand and merchant I'm going to buy from.

My 2 cents, from the retail side of the industry.

Linda Buquet

The scarier part of Chrome is if it becomes very popular then Google will have that much more data they can use against affiliates. I can see slaps coming down from data Chrome gathers at some point down the road.

Too bad for the cookie problem, many affiliate products use long term cookies for future sales and all this is wipped off now.

When someone searching for green tea comes to the landing page, 95% of the time, they fill out the offer right then and there, so even if they are in incognito, the offer still gets credited to me.

Few of the affiliate programs promoted in the ways we promote them rely on the cookie period beyond the time someone closes their browser.