The countdown to their affiliate accounts being shutdown starts now.
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
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.