Why Does Kutoku Require a CNAME DNS Record?

Thanks for asking! This can be quite a technical topic but the general points are:

Ad Blockers

Unfortunately affiliate marketing uses similar technologies to (most) advertising networks and thus experiences collateral damage from browsers' ad blocking technology. Over recent years browsers like Safari, Firefox and Brave have made a number of changes to their browsers in this area and many, if not all of the incumbent affiliate networks are affected due to their legacy technology.

Kutoku requires a CNAME because it enables us to work effectively within the new frameworks that the browser vendors are mandating.

The code snippets that run on our merchant partner sites, and our publisher autolinker are loaded from a custom subdomain of the partner's site (e.g. subdomain.merchant.com) so that we can have a high level of confidence that our code is loaded and the attribution is recorded.

Security

Using a CNAME allows us to set secure HTTP only 1st party cookies that cannot be read by any other Javascript that may be running on the page. Our cookies can only be read on the servers that host your website and our Kutoku servers, not on (for example) Google or Facebook's servers.

Attribution and Reporting

It's vital that Kutoku's partners are confident in the attribution of clicks and sales to publishers. Using a custom domain make the entire network more secure and reliable, which is really important for our publishers — they need to be confident that the traffic they're sending to merchants is being counted so they can be more effective in the same way that merchants need to be confident the referred sales are coming from the publishers.