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Comment by raimonds | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your feedback! I'm newbie here. Is it OK to use affiliate links on projects like this?

As others have said, totally ok. Everyone should have a chance to make some money from a project like this.

Shameless plug: check out http://viglink.com to get it done. Sign up, one piece of JS, everything gets automatically affiliated. CEO is a major HN addict (and friend, in the interest of disclosure).

Neat idea. Though FAQ links on viglink.com do not seem to work (atleast in Chrome). http://www.viglink.com/faq http://www.viglink.com/support/faq

Thanks for bringing that up. It's fixed.

borked in ffx as well

Thanks for the link, will check it out!

There's a strong entrepreneurial spirit on HN and that's why a lot of people are telling you that "It's okay to make money".

Personally, I think it would cheapen the whole thing. Websites that contain nothing but affiliate links to "Products I might like" are already a thing: it's what all those millions of parked domains such as testing.com are.

I have to (respectfully) disagree with you. There is literally no difference between what you see as a user whether there are affiliated links or not. So how does letting the guy monetize his project cheapen the thing?

It's not just a random list of products - the site is still the same - a cool list of products determined algorithmically by their mentions on HN. So why not let the guy earn a few bucks for putting it together?

I'd actually argue this is in many ways the perfect use case for affiliate links. The site owner has no bias - he's written a cool script to extract "votes" from the HN community itself, and as a reward for doing so, he should have the right to get a commission on sales. He provides value to the end user by aggregating product mentions, and he provides value to the merchants by highlighting products that might otherwise go un(or, less) noticed.

Thoughts?

It's always a bit of a catch-22 in my eyes.

A site that doesn't use affiliate links in their recommendations seems more honest, and with that in mind, deserves to earn some money for essentially selling the product on behalf of the vendor.

A site dedicated to affiliate marketing has a disingenuous scent on all their recommendations; Are they actually recommending the product or are they just promoting it to get their cut?

In this case, it's a pretty fancy project that took plenty of time to construct, and I completely feel he should be able to take his cut for putting it all together. I immediately clicked the title expecting to see referral codes on all the links, and was surprised there weren't any. Then to read his comments asking if that was ok, it made his intentions seem really authentic.

You're doubting the moral integrity of the algorithm?

Yeah. That regexp is greedy, obviously.

This would be the right way to use affiliate links. Do it.

As long as you are not putting some shady redirects, I think you should put some affiliate links. People will buy it for the same price, the difference is that you get a cut for the trouble :)

I certainly don't see any problem with it at all, though I didn't understand the dust-up when pinterest was re-writing links to include their affiliate code either.. so maybe there's an argument there that I'm unaware of.

If you do upfront disclosure is the best way, if you can imply that the funds go towards something cool you are working on or towards even better. Alternatively you can just say its an experiment and direct people to comment here. But yes tell visitors upfront if the links are affiliate.

You could mention the use of affiliate links in the footer, just in case someone gets snarky.

I had the mistaken impression it was against Amazon TOS to call attention to the links. After reading the TOS again, though, I think that would be ok from Amazon's perspective. There's a line between saying on the page "click these links so I'll make money" and saying the links are Amazon affiliate. Amazon TOS here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...

Nice page, though. You should make money from it. How are you extracting the references to books from HN?

Thanks for your feedback! I use HNSearch API https://www.hnsearch.com/api to get submissions and comments. And then Amazon API to normalize and get meta info.

What do you think about having two links side-by-side (affiliate and non-affiliate)? Or having a global swith to turn on/off affiliated links?

Just put in the affiliate code. You are already advertising for Amazon, so you might as well get the commission.

Yeah, just mention the affiliate links at the bottom of the page and have a little link "Click here to remove" and have it run some javascript to change the links.

Man, would anyone really go this far out of their way to make sure another person doesn't benefit?

there's no reason for this

Why not? It is always good to make some profit from the amount of work you put in, no?

This is generally a pretty heated debate topic, and there's no clear answer. Some people will be outraged; how dare you try and make some money!

But in general, if you're upfront and honest about using affiliate links (put a friendly notice in the footer about it), most people should be OK with it. I certainly am.

You could have the default be affiliate links and have an opt-out button that sets a cookie to turn them off, maybe.

That allows you to make both groups happy.

Don't over-think it. It's not sinful to make a bit of money from a helpful tool. Don't even bother with the switch to remove the affiliate code, if your users can't grant you that, they can copy-paste the link and remove your affiliate code manually - that is, if they don't already have a browser plugin that does that for them.

My thought is as long as you're not editorializing it's fine. If you're recommending products and affiliate linking then people have to question the legitimacy of your recommendation. If you're simply linking to every book mentioned on HN then there's no conflict of interest.

Great idea! I've added it to bookmarks. Yes, I think it's ok to put affiliate links.

I was also surprised, that was the first thing I looked for. Go for it!

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