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Comment by dmytton | Hacker News Reader

20 pointsdmytton25 comments

Whether this is the best way to do it depends on how much you value miles, which depends on the airline / your location / what kind of flying you do. For a lot of people, just taking 2% cash back might be a better deal, though.

I also get redirected to an affiliate link when I click, contrary to the statement on the blog that, "there are no affiliate links."

Nice post though the title was a bit misleading since the flying is only free because he chose to focus all his credit card rewards on miles. So I guess it isn't really free.

His focus of his rewards doesn't change the end result that he posted about.

I followed the link and holy caw, 37.1% APR?!

If it's paid off entirely each month (which the author does), the interest rate doesn't matter.

That's the "typical APR" and includes the annual fee in the calculation. If you read the fine print at the bottom of the page, it's using a credit limit of 1500 pounds for this calculation, which seems a bit low.

That's the downside to go with the upside. The point is that you don't miss payments, so the APR doesn't matter.

How to make money while flying free in a bootstrapped startup: Provide an affiliate link to a credit card offer and write a blog post with a link bait title.

Nice job! CC offer affiliate links have got to be in the $50 a pop range, no?

In all fairness I can tell you that isn't David's style to do something like that. He's a right proper HN coder, and he shared this with me a few weeks ago while in SF. Try not to assume the worst of people, eh?

None of the links contain affiliate codes, and the disclaimer at the bottom of the article specifically mentions this:

> I don’t often write about specific products but I think this is a handy tip for startups. I wasn’t asked or paid to write this, or any other post on the blog. And there are no affiliate links.

I don't mean to nitpick, but while there aren't any affiliate "codes" there are most certainly google ads which are contextually showing ads for airline cards within the blog post.

Yes, there are. Follow the link and notice the redirect embeds params for the affiliate link.

Yikes, I stand correct. Thank you.

The blog is hosted by wordpress.com. Whilst I didn't include any affiliate links in the original source of the post (as you can see from the source code), it seems wordpress.com silently embeds Skimlinks into footer of the page. This is not generating any revenue for myself.

I have purchased the "no ads" upgrade which has removed the Skimlinks embed.

First, the guy clearly didn't do this, which would have been obvious if you would have taken 5 seconds to check before accusing him.

Second, even if he did, so what? I don't understand this animosity that a large part of hacker news seems to hold toward affiliate links. The tip he shared is clearly useful and might result in someone signing up for a rewards program. Is there anything wrong with him being rewarded for sharing that tip? How are affiliate programs worse than advertising, subscriptions, donation links, or any other form of monetizing content? Or is it literally making money that you object to?

The worry about affiliate-link posts, I think, is insincerity: that someone might be flogging a product because it pays them a nice kickback, not because they actually think it's good, or better than an alternative product that doesn't have an affiliate program.

In general, who cares? If the content of the post is good, then it'll get traction on HN. If not, it won't.

Part of what makes the content of a post good, though, is that it's someone saying something they actually think is true / is good advice / whatever. If someone's saying something because they're being paid to say it, it seems just not worth spending any time on. Same with other kinds of insincere writing; I wouldn't be very interested in someone's story about their startup if it were totally fabricated, for example.

> First, the guy clearly didn't do this, which would have been obvious if you would have taken 5 seconds to check before accusing him.

Actually he is using affiliate links, it's transparent (see http://skimlinks.com )

See my comment below.

Nice job! CC offer affiliate links have got to be in the $50 a pop range, no?

In most Web browsers, you can hover over a link and see the URL in your status bar. This might be advisable in future.

Even though it's not linked directly -- it's still an affiliate link. He's using http://skimlinks.com/

The link to the site has no affiliate code, but the on_click event is hijacked -- when I click it I am redirected to:

https://scripts.affiliatefuture.com/afncsecureclick.aspx?mer...

Whoa. You're right.

And there are no affiliate links.

So, just to nail this down, is the guy a liar or doesn't he realize what's going on?

The commenter above just didn't realize it; the submitter never denied he's using affiliates.

My quote was from the actual article. See http://skitch.com/petercooper/d89h2/noaff in case it gets changed.

The guy who wrote the post said "there are no affiliate links" yet, as you point out, we certainly get redirected through something that looks like an affiliate scheme when clicking on the links there.

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