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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. 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."

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.

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Cashback websites are pretty big in the UK, I'm not sure how big in the US.

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.

I would not mind someone rewriting links on my site. I am too lazy to join an affiliate program, so nobody gets any money from my links. But since merchants are willing to pay you a certain amount of money for providing a link, it seems wasteful to not collect that. This plugin lets charities get that wasted money -- no effort for the site owner, minimal effort for the user, a bit of money for charity. There are worse things on the Internet than this.

That's just the thing. It's not wasted money. It's built into merchants profit margins.

If you start taking that profit margin away, they'd likely just raise prices to compensate.

Do you think this, or do you have numbers? If affiliate links hurt the merchant, the merchant can pull them whenever they like. Considering Amazon has gone to court to keep their affiliate program alive, I don't think it's something they're doing because they forgot to take down the web page for some special promotion. I think it probably helps them.

There's a difference between affiliate programs run by people actively promoting the merchants, and incentive driven things like this.

The former, the merchant gets free advertising, publicity, etc and gains sales.

The latter, they get their profit margins eaten into.

Are you seriously saying you'd expect this to increase a merchants sales?

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.

The book Predictably Irrational actually refers to a case study that shows sales go up after adding an offer where a small % of rev will goto charity.

That's a completely different case though. If they do it in house they get tax breaks, they get good PR, they get increase in repeat purchases etc.

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

Tax breaks and pr alone would not be enough to make merchants do it. It would also have to actually help convince people to buy. Which it clearly does, considering how well established this technique is. There are some industries, like chocolate, where such offers are not just a promotional technique but are built into the companies' business models.

http://www.chocolatebar.com/

Wait. My assumption from the story was that they had actual deals with these retailers?

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 :-)

14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links).

the line about charities was added four days ago! here's what it looked like before: http://grab.by/2Ai5

Companies use broad language in TOSes to give themselves maximal power, but ultimately they decide case by case. If some form of affiliate link brings in buyers they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, then it would not be in their interest to prevent it.

Goodshop.com supports amazon, and they seem to have some special arrangement.

The incentive is not for using Special Links, it's for installing their plugin. The user was going to click the Special Links anyway.

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