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Comment by fnid | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten tired of Fred's blog. I really don't like seeing requests made from my browser every other second. I don't like how slow it is because he has every social hook in there, many to his own companies.

He's a venture capitalist, why is he wasting his time with affiliate marketing? In the amount of time it takes him to build the link to amazon, he should have been working on closing a million dollar deal or doing research into companies or finding a better justification for supporting web fraud companies like zynga who make the internet worse like a lot of his investments, bit.ly to name just one more.

I also find him to be a bit hypocritical. He blasts conferences, then blogs all about having gone to them. He's lost a lot of credibility in my book. I don't think he or his investments make the web better.

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We all tend to be hypocrites in one way or another and whether Fred Wilson is one, to me at least, isn't relevant. You've just posted a completely ad hominem attack while completely overlooking the premise of an interesting post (granted, "interesting" is a subjective statement). I also don't think it's terribly surprising that he would promote/give a platform for his portfolio companies - that's almost expected.

As for affiliate marketing - why wouldn't he? Aside from a smaller argument that every penny counts, it would seem like it's a useful little experiment which broadly speaking ,suggests a significant opportunity in ecommerce given what he's saying is that it's a mispriced asset. Whether or not it's a mispriced asset that can be monetized is what should be up for debate.

I think in this case, ad hominem is appropriate. He is arguing about mispriced assets while investing in companies that sells more virtual tractors than John Deere.

He's saying, in effect, Amazon isn't paying you enough to waste your time posting links to their books, while making other people pay good money to waste their time growing virtual gardens.

Rationale like that doesn't work well for him.

virtual goods is a way for people who play the game to pay for it in a very elegant freemium model.

you are mixing two issues up.

affiliate marketing is about helping publishers/creators of content make more money for the work they do

virtual goods is about helping game developers get paid for building games people like to play without having to charge upfront

Virtual goods are entertainment. Granted, I don't play Farmville or any other game (and I do find all those updates on fb annoying). I assume the pricing is pretty transparent. Just as I find buying tickets to sports games to be a waste of my time (with a particular net negative on baseball), to each their own.

Affiliate marketing however, is where the assignment of value somewhat more arbitrarily/discreetly decided as it depends on actions of third parties. Besides, it's about pointing out an opportunity that exists - and in that light, even if I were take your position, you could make the argument that it's one that he's very qualified to make.

To his credit, Fred donates all proceeds from his blog to charity: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/fred-wilson-makes-3000...

i am "wasting my time with affiliate marketing" because i want to understand this stuff and possibly make it better.

and zynga is far from a fraud. it's the most successful social gaming company on the web, it has innovated on the virtual goods model and proven that you can build a very large business with that model.

i don't like to go to big splashy conferences and that's what i blogged about. i do like to go to niche conferences where i can meet real people and entrepreneurs.

i'd like to understand why you think the investments we make don't make the web better.

Fred, as someone who felt your wrath earlier today all I can say is that we (the loosely dev/hacker community) feel that Zynga, playfish,et al. peed in the pool by having bad offers in the first place and made it much harder for the rest of us.

We also placed lots of stock in you personally as the older, wiser voice on the Web, and then the shitstorm broke out over "scamville" and you were nowhere to be found on this subject. It hurt to see someone we looked up too as a "grown-up who gets it" not say what you were clearly thinking.

i think you need to understand the limitations of what i can say when our companies get in the news. i can't talk about stuff twitter is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff zynga is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff that etsy is doing without clearing it with them first. etc, etc.

and my wrath is not at you, it's at all the misinformation out there, spread by blogs who did not work and just repeated the misinformation about zynga

VCs should have hands-on experience with the things they invest in. You can either not read his blog or use browser extensions to blog the social hooks you don't care for.

Fred Wilson's ability to make great investments is, among other things, a function of his knowledge, timing, network and luck. He's probably tried out loads of advertising and affiliate schemes so he knows what he's talking about and, more importantly, he knows what to look for in investment opportunities.

Adaptive Blue is a company in USV portfolio whose primary revenue source appears to be affiliate links. Fred needs to understand why the links are under valued (though certainly not underpriced- they're much more valuable to Amzon than anyone else.)

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