Browsarity (YC W10) Allows You To Donate Affiliate Fees To Charity
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However, sites like skimlinks seem to be growing (and staying in business) which I think surprised alot of people.
Lets all not forget that these programs mainly survive around 2 affiliate programs- eBay and Amazon. Getting canned from either would be disaster.
Specifically, I think this is not moot: "arguable if this generates any value"
Making the association that buying from Amazon == donating to charity is worth money to them.
Also, at least with eBay, the big money in affiliate revenue is signing up new users. You get paid about ~1.5% of the transaction price vs. $25 every time a new user places a bid (they don't even have to win). So at worst these companies are paying the big bonus once, and they're still making a profit on every sale.
tl;dr: there is a value add here, unlike than cookie dropping.
(Unless Eric is involved, of course.)
You said that was for starters -- what else?
Also, what type of corporate entity is Browsarity? Is it actually a 501(c)(3)?
So I guess my question is, is this actually a charity?
Well, ok, I should be fair. That's a rhetorical question, because I'm 99% sure the answer is "no." So I suppose my real questions are:
1. Isn't that a conflict of interest? 2. How do I know the money is going where you say it's going? 3. If you're donating this revenue to charities via the affiliate fees you pocket, are you getting the tax benefits of that? i.e., Amazon credits your affiliate account via the activity of your users. You then "donate" that to the Red Cross (or whomever), which comes with tax benefits.
Obviously if their viral loop works that will make the product. I'm saying the above will have no impact on whether their product is viral or not (speaking from experience). I'd even be willing to bet on an A/B test against their viral coefficient.
I read the original comment to say, "We are different because we show you the number of dollars your whole social network brings in." That's cool. I like numbers. But that feature isn't rocket fuel.
Instead I should have taken it to mean, "We're not that different in principle, but we're focused on making charitable giving viral, like Causes for the web at large."
So mea culpa.
It has a feature that has the potential, if people use it, to make it viral. But TBH I'm skeptical.
Obviously Causes works, although the donation step occurs at a different place in the funnel, but I don't see in principle why it couldn't.
It'd be like Beacon, but you only broadcast messages saying you donated XYZ to ABC charity via Browsarity.
If I understood how this works, it simply replaces the URL of the affiliate link on the page I'm viewing. If that's all it takes to redirect the affiliate payment, what's there to prevent a rogue Firefox extension that secretly replaces every amazon.com link with one that deposits into the author's account? How about a proxy server that scans for these URLs and rewrites them so they make the server's operator rich?
While it's good to see this being used for a good cause, it feels as if exactly the same method can be serving more nefarious purposes. Perhaps this will require oversight from the whoever runs the affiliate program, and I'm having a hard time imagining how they'd be happy if a third party is taking a cut of these fees.
But yes, you are correct, some of the more "successful" (if you can call it that) Windows malware has taken the form of IE6 browser plugins and toolbars that overwrite affiliate links in any page you browse to. I can seriously imagine some enterprising 16 year old somewhere in Eastern Europe making 5-6 figure monthly income from this back in the early 2000s.
A related question: does it re-write links that already have an affiliate id in them? That would be really gauche.
[EDIT] Here's another way of thinking about it: what if they just kept the money and didn't donate to charity? I'm almost sure they'd be shut down. So why does donating to charity make it acceptable?
They do not.
Imagine how pleased merchants would be if an existing affiliate site decided to promote their affiliate links with red underlines and to donate 90% of the money to charity. The visitor's choice of charity no less.
For example:
http://quidco.com http://www.SimplyCashBack.co.uk http://www.cashbackkingdom.com http://www.topcashback.co.uk
Literally thousands of them.
Also there's a firefox plugin that finds cashback sites for any links on a page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7442
They're definitely reasonable earners, but TBH I think it's a harder sell to say "We'll give the commission to charity" vs "You can have the commission".
One of the secrets is that there's usually a minimum withdrawal limit on cashback sites, eg £20, and unless you get up to that, the money isn't paid out. So what happens is you get tons of accounts abandoned before they get to £20 - this is apparently where most of the profit comes from.
Also I don't think rewriting links on websites is a good idea at all. That's just not nice. Reminds me of that YC company that does a firefox plugin that removes the adverts from google search pages and puts other stuff there instead.
>> "I don't know if you noticed this detail, but they graphically distinguish their affiliate links (with a red underline). This means their affiliate links do exactly what merchants hope affiliate links will do: draw customers to them. The red link says "click on this and if you buy something we'll donate money to your favorite charity."
Are you seriously saying you'd expect this to increase a merchants sales? I'm not so sure. It just cuts into their profit and deceives website owners out of potential money.
How about doing some decent natural language parsing for intent and matching that to a massive database of adverts, and providing it for publishers?
That's a problem that really needs solving. eg "I might look at some flatscreen TVs this w/end" -> list of adverts for flatscreen TVs.
keyword matching only gets you a tiny way, but recognizing real intent and meaning in text would be really valuable I think.
Just my 2c.
Yes. The evidence this works is the number of merchants who already offer to donate to charity when you purchase something. And in those cases you don't even get to choose the charity.
What do the merchants get from browsarity? They get their profit margin taken away, with the vague statement that those sales may not have existed if it had not been a red underlined link? :/
If I were a merchant I know which I'd choose.
I just don't think this sort of thing can work well.... reminds me of tipjoy
If you start taking that profit margin away, they'd likely just raise prices to compensate.
The former, the merchant gets free advertising, publicity, etc and gains sales.
The latter, they get their profit margins eaten into.
Is that not the case? If not it doesn't seem a smart move seeing as their whole business is based on access to affiliate accounts that can be cancelled at a moments notice for as many reasons as the merchant likes :-)
(I'm genuinely curious, for anyone who feels like speculating.)
Some things I learned: nonprofits don't like to raise money for no reason, and don't like to raise money to receive 2 months later.
The service will have to be super passive because people are lazy and will often forgo an extra step in before purchasing.
But once you get the users on your side you'll have to get the merchants on your side by convincing them it will help business. Also the affiliate communities frown on "stealing" tracking cookies. They hate what UPromise does, even though I've argued it's not wrong at all.
I stopped doing it because I stopped believing in the "world changingness" of the whole idea. a) nonprofits don't like to raise money for the sake of raising money, and it usually took months before the money could be sent out. So they couldn't plan how to use the money raised. b)the idea isn't really better than direct donation except we're introducing a new middleman, and making it less transparent because the merchant now pays charities with money they get from the end consumer.
> Why not give a bit of free money to charity?
I want to mention that it's not really free money. In the end the consumer pays because the merchant pays.
1. Someone thinks of the clever idea of overwriting non-affiliate urls with an affiliate url of their account. 2. In realizing that no one would ever install this, they think "how can I convince people to add this to their browser and take a cut of the profit?" 3. Charity!
I hope I am way wrong.
And man, the news in here is really becoming a TechCrunch aggregator.
And that's particularly easy to do with a newly launched startup, since the right way to launch most things is to launch very early-- way before what you've built is formidable enough to stand up to determined criticism.
Why don't you try giving the founders the benefit of the doubt instead? I can assure you they'd give a project of yours the same.
I've said this before (You told me off for moaning about twitvid.io), but I doubt people want to hear the feedback "Yes that's nice dear, lovely" from HN. They want the real opinions of people.
We don't know the founders, so we can't asses them, we can only assess the idea. And this idea is a fundamentally bad one. Hopefully they change it soon enough.
A lost of these critical comments could be phrased more politely (like "how do you plan to get away with this"), but they're all fundamentally reflective of what a middling idea this is in general, and what a terrible idea this is for anything couched as a 'startup'.
for the following reasons:
some of us run companies and see how this pushes the boundaries of abusing the affiliate system by taking a profit margin
were cynical enough to not take the donating to charity bit as salve for the first gripe
I'm not sure it's a lack of givng the benefit of the doubt as disquiet at the ethics of the idea.
No one is being forced to do anything. If Amazon or Ebay doesn't like the service they can disable the account, change TOS etc.
What about this:
You have an agreement with a shop owner, that you can buy stuff from him wholesale at a discount.
You then hang around in the shop (Maybe in disguise) waiting for customers who are about to buy stuff.
Instead of letting them get on and buy stuff, you accost them, and suggest they let you act as a middle man, and you'll buy it wholesale from the shop keeper, and donate the difference to charity, after you take your cut.
Sounds shady doesn't it. And the shopkeeper is being forced to do it until he finds out about the scam.