Suggest to HN: A Hacker News Amazon Affiliate Link
I post a fair lot of Amazon links when talking about books. I don't have an affiliate link, as I don't recommend enough books to bother with one, and I don't want any appearance of conflict of interest when I recommend books on a public, community site that I'm just a guest at.
But grinich just wrote in a thread:
> Will you post an affiliate link? If you recommend a good book to me, I'd like you to get a kickback.
Maybe he's got a point - I mean, my no affiliate link links just mean a waste of a small percent that somebody could be getting. To Paul and the rest of the Hacker News/YCombinator team, do you guys want to register an affiliate link or have one already? I'll add it to my posts here, and you can do whatever you like with the credit you get. Use it to buy books to read or to stock a startup library for your funded startups. I don't mind taking a minute to append it to any book recommendations I make, it gives a little coin or resources back to a great site, and I suppose it is a waste of potential revenues not to use Amazon's affiliate program.
You don't need to append it automatically or anything crazy - just let people choose to use it if they want to. If you've got one, I'll use it, and be happy that you guys are getting a bit of extra coin or free books to benefit what you're doing.
When I link to aff stuff on amazon I usually do "[link] (aff)" so if people want to go out of their way to copy the link and remove the affiliate tag they can.
... but more recently I've been using a link cloaker (ie paulstamatiou.com/random_product_on_amazon ) with a WP plugin called pretty link pro. Boosts conversions a ton, tracks clicks and so on and can even rotate links so you can test out different affiliate codes with the same link and tell it how often you want certain ones to appear. Sly, yes I know but I can use the help to pay my rent. :-)
That being said my best month ever was only $300 on amazon and that was because someone read my review of a cell signal booster and literally bought a pallet of them.
My idea is based on the following: If the reader was amazed with the review you wrote and convinced with the book and he "Really" wants to thank you, so he should go more steps to do that.
Put your referral tag in your profile, he add it to the link and give you back commission.
If he liked your review and he doesn't want to kickback even a cent, he won't bother. Like that, only people who were both amazed and convinced of the writer-commission idea will give the commission. People who really don't care about whom was the writer and don't want to support him for writing the review, won't pay. Neither they won't write review , since they'll think people will never bother to help them.
The reason for this non-easy-reward system is to stop the flow of spammers that may result if affiliate links were permitted here. HN has got a potential buyer base (imo), so marketers will come here and write their reviews, even if they don't induce the HN community, they'll still think of the organic traffic that will drive by time. Such a system will kill the odds that organic traffic can make sale, people who find HN through Google don't know that the Tag is in the profile, even if they bother to kickback!
HN could do what Metafilter does and automatically rewrite all affiliate links to their own. If they don't want/need the money, they could donate it to charity.
This is probably way more PT Barnum than pg would like to be; but it would be pretty awesome to use the proceeds to fund a "community selected" startup. Startups could opt-in if they didn't make the regular YC cut; but were in the next N% of applicants.
pg could make a poll with links to the various pitches and the one with the highest vote totals gets funded. Of course, you'd have to worry about poll-stuffing and the like; but I think it would be an interesting experiment.
why does metafilter think they're in the right to change those affiliate links and steal those rewards? why would anyone bother responding to posts on their site knowing that not only can they not get rewarded for responding with a recommendation, but that metafilter is stealing the reward from them?
i don't understand the aversion to affiliate links. if someone buys a book from amazon based on my recommendation (and link), amazon thanks me by giving me a portion of their profit on the sale. that shopper doesn't pay extra money, the author doesn't receive less money, and i am rewarded for taking the time to respond to that person's question.
As far as I'm aware, MetaFilter users are pretty much ok with this way of supporting the site (they were actually asked before implementing this [1]).
In fact, it was frowned upon posting affiliate links with users' codes.
[1] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-ch...
> why does metafilter think they're in the right to change those affiliate links and steal those rewards?
Because that is the policy that the moderators and community arrived at. Some people think that allowing affiliate links incentivizes behavior detrimental to the site. You are free to disagree, but calling it "stealing" is begging the question.
Allowing affiliate links gives people an incentive to push products which they wouldn't necessarily recommend otherwise.
Stripping affiliate links is kind of like nofollow for search engines.
Is this also what URL shorteners do?
I think a problem with affiliate links is that they can only reward people who cause sales to occur. This is good if your commentary on the book was so useful it made someone buy the book. But what if your criticism is so useful, it caused a prospective buyer to not buy the book. You did just as much a service to him/her by providing a valuable opinion, yet you get no reward.
Next to every Amazon affiliate link should be a "Donate if I convinced you not to buy" button.
I would suggest, as I have seen heavily used on forums, that you provide two urls for readers. One would be a direct link, and the secondary link contains the affiliate id. I personally like to think of it as along the same lines of a "contribute" paypal link on low traffic blogs.
I tend to manually remove affiliate URLs from links if I was not given a choice. I tend to be more favorable of signing up or purchasing with affiliate URLs when:
* I was given a decision to opt in
* I was notified that the link contained an affiliate code up front.
That's really probably just you :) I'd just add the link, don't see the harm done.
I'm with you on this one. I don't see the problem with affilate links. It doesn't change the value you get out of the product.
Sure there might be a few odd people out there who live of affilate links but is that a bad thing? If someone sees value in the information they've been provided where is the harm?
The harm is just that you have to question the motivation for posting the link in the first place.
"Is this person posting this because they really like the product or because they get a kickback?"
As long as weired spammers don't discover the site and come here to post their reviews. Imagine HN flooding with such comments, how'd you moderate this?
YC is not a charity.
Sure, and a dolphin isn't a tiger. But if I can increase the revenues of a site that I'm getting free access to without any real hassle, I'm happy to. I'd like people who are benefiting my life to get compensated. Two reasons - first, it's a good thing in a general sense for people to get compensated for their efforts and value they deliver. Second, generally having people get paid for delivering a good product makes them more likely to deliver it. Who knows how much the most HN Amazon commissions could be - a couple hundred bucks a month? But that's a couple grand a year, which would be enough to build and sustain a pretty good YCombinator library of technical and business books. And again, it's no skin off my back, so why not?
A site which is owned and operated by an (apparently quite successful[1]) early-stage investment firm. Your sentiment is admirable, but I don't think they need a couple thousand dollars extra per year.
But you're right: it's no skin off our backs.
[1] http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...