Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamhamed | Hacker News Reader

we work in the affiliate business and this has the potential to completely desotry the business model. Many of our partners rely on affiliate money to make ends meet, it is what powers most content creators.

Safari is planning to use ML to detect click_id type of query parameters and strip that from URLs. That's just poor execution and business destroying. PCM restrictions are horrible too.. we have to design the link so it stays within safari's specs:

> With an ad-click, an 8-bit ID can be transmitted (a number between 0 and 255, i.e. 256 possible values / campaigns) - per domain > For a conversion, a 4-bit ID is transmitted (a number between 00 and 15, i.e. 16 different types of conversion) - per domain

Not to mention Chrome and Firefox has other ideas, each different on how their PCM will be integrated. Other than the mega corps, noone is benefitting from this privacy enhancement. Just more work to adapt.

View on HN

> Other than the mega corps, noone is benefitting from this privacy enhancement. Just more work to adapt.

One time I was talking to a real estate agent, shortly after some of the post-'08-meltdown regulations had gone into effect. She said something like:

"It makes it so appraisers can't fudge the numbers a little higher to make sure people get their loans, now. Which I know wasn't what they intended, but it's what they've done, and it's hurting people."

She thought one of the things the regulation was definitely supposed to do, entirely on purpose, was some accident, and that this thing happening before that was not OK and was, over many iterations, partially responsible for the housing bubble happening in the first place, was in fact fine. She was totally unable to grasp that this behavior was bad and that the regulation was supposed to stop it, and that that was definitely a good thing—but it was making it harder for her and her banker(!) husband to close deals and sell loans, that is, to make money, so surely it can't actually be a good idea and overall beneficial to lots and lots of people.

bingo.

> we work in the affiliate business and this has the potential to completely desotry the business model.

Good. The world does not owe you a “business model.” Find some positive way to contribute to society instead.

Can't the tracking information just be stuck in the actual URL itself? Even in the domain name? So instead of amazon.de/product?affilate=hamhamed it would be something like hamhamed.amazon.de/product?

And if that won't work, just encode the entire url as amazon.de/2ec1a277-0c96-40d3-8fe1-e418fd82986d

Cacheing becomes more challenging, but you could theoretically decode the scheme at the cdn

Stack Overflow has links with user id, I think this will continue to work https://stackoverflow.com/a/70506056/12544391

Since Apple has access to everyone's emails, they could see that the same email has a unique link in every email and show the user some kind of warning like "This link has a unique tracking ID, do you want to proceed?"

Puts the information and power back in the users hands.

Apples hands*

Stopping tracking by the way of more invasive tracking like extracting content from emails is not a good thing.

They do mention that subdomains can't be used for tracking in the introduction to Private Click Measurement [1]

But I have to be honest that I can't quite wrap my head around how this is supposed to work.

1. https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...

> this has the potential to completely desotry the business model

It's a start but I'm not this optimistic yet.

The end user benefits. Tracking needs to be destroyed.

Yeah, I make money from affiliate links. That's how I can work full time making completely free content. Many of my partners use Google Analytics and already struggle to track leads. This won't help.

God I hope you're right.

You hope that I fail?

Is affiliate just url parameters?

Is there no other way to measure?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com