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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

You know what the messed up thing about Wirecutter's affiliate marketing is?

Their Amazon links are consistently broken to the point where the links don't point to products but are faulty search queries. Like, if you are going to compromise your reputation doing affiliate marketing, at least get the damn links right so I don't have to perform a Amazon search to find the actual product.

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Some might say this is intentional, the whole point for the link is to corrupt your Amazon cookie so that they get credit for the (next?) purchase you make.

At least that's how I've always assumed the links work, not that you have to buy the exact product immediately.

This blew my mind. And would be highly unethical that Amazon should know, since the accounting often happens on the publisher's side

https://toolguyd.com/top-tool-deals-11122020/ has some comments on what the site owner can see, things like which links work better than others, etc. Surprisingly large amounts of info could leak without anyone really realizing it, even if everything is entirely "anonymized" there's still the total dollar amount paid out, etc.

The product link not resolving doesn't improve this payout for the publisher. The cookie gets dropped _either way_ and when a purchase happen Amazon will check for a referral cookie and payout accordingly for whatever qualifies in that cart.

As long as you end up on amazon's site, then the cookie was likely dropped and your next purchase may pay out affiliate commission to whichever publisher's links you most recently clicked through.

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