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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This might be slightly deceptive... but you could try adding affiliate codes to all links to product websites (Amazon, NewEgg, etc.)

edit: URL shorteners might make this difficult, but still possible if you can keep the widget responsive enough while following links server-side.

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I like this one best - ads are probably not an option because widgets have limited real estate.

To eliminate the deceptive part, just message all yours users first before changing it. Be candid about money issues (ala reddit). Start with just Amazon maybe.

"Hey guys, this thing has blown up and we can't afford the hosting cost. To keep it free, we've got to try something. So starting in 1 month, we'll automagically insert our Amazon affiliate code into any tweets than contain an Amazon link. All other links won't be touched. We really didn't want to do this but it is either this or shut down the widget (or start charging for it). Thanks for bearing with us as we run this!"

You might lose 10% of freeloaders but this is a good thing.

I've long wondered if this kind of approach is actually something that affiliate programs would allow if you got big. You are not promoting their wares, you are simply profiting off of organic promotion that would have occurred anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon or whomever decided to close your account if you started making significant amounts of money.

Deal aggregating sites do this I am pretty sure, slickdeals.com for example.

If someone clicks on a link that your widget provided (a link that would not have otherwise been there) it seems like you are actually providing value to the company.

The link would be there regardless of whether or not you (as an advertiser) ran an affiliate program.

I've actually tried this on the main site, but it was not so successful. Mostly because the links are shortened, and I don't have the capacity to unshorten every link (most computation is done client-side anyway), and programs like VigLink don't look at short links either.

Have link HTML printed out as per normal, attach JS that routes every clicked link through your servers. E.g.

    This is a twitter <a href="http://bit.ly/blah"
    onclick="document.location='http://yourservers.com/follow?url=' +
    escape(this.href);return false">link</a>.

That way you can look up the Twitter links only if they are clicked and any slow down happens after the click, not before display.

As a bonus you get to see what links everyone is clicking as well.

You'd likely need to roll your own mini-crawler to dig out the shorten links, and where applicable, create new ones and replace them. Questionable indeed.

Ahh, yeah hadn't thought about that....you'd have to unshorten and then re-encode every amazon link. Still though, seems like it might be possible.

You may want to use http://unshort.me api service to unshorten the links.

I think this might be the best way, for the widget as is. There might be a problem in that most of the search terms don't typically include a affliatable link.

I think the best way might to go to the premium model, the only thing is that by restricting the number of features might just get people to run to another service.

If not enough links are present, one could also create a map of keywords and appropriate products and create links where none exist today. (I have no idea if this would break Twitter's ToS.) Heck, advertisers may even buy certain keywords directly from you... advertisers like me. ;-)

You could be really deceptive and rewrite affilliate links on the page the widget's on. I wouldn't do it though.

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