The site also has association with several affiliate sites that specialize in volleyball resources such as findavolleyballclub.com, vbvolleyball.com, and indoorvolleyballs.com.

Known as mirrors, these affiliate sites contain identical copies of Tucows's software files.

However, more recent examples exist of "thin" affiliate sites that are using the affiliate marketing model to create value for Consumers by offering them a service.

For a lot of affiliate sites, this is the most natural way to link to the merchant site.

New Worlds also maintained a small list of affiliate sites; the latest of these was the Star Army scifi roleplay.

Those affiliate sites include small businesses and even charities that use affiliate links as fund-raisers.

A spokeswoman for Amazon, which has 800,000 affiliate sites feeding it customers, said the company worked to protect those sites from hijacking.

Small affiliate sites have bitterly complained that the shopping software companies are stealing commissions by siphoning off the small sites' prospective customers.

And in some cases, the disgruntled affiliate sites have boycotted merchants who pay commissions to the shopping software companies.

FreeCreditReport.com as well as its affiliate site FreeCreditScore.com has been the subject of two major lawsuits.