Amazon drops price on their Kindle 2 to $299
amazon.com
amazon.com
Maybe it does make some money.
The Amazon cookie persists for 24 hours, so if you click on that Kindle link today, but then tonight, go home and buy a defibrillator or 10 camcorders, the guy who slipped his affiliate link onto HN gets the commission on that.
I use those as examples because they're things people have bought after clicking through NIN mp3/pre-order links.
It's also worth noting that Amazon does a flat 10% rate on Kindle sales for affiliates... all other consumer electronics are a flat 4%.
Amazon Associates is like free money if you run a blog, and so long as you're up front about that, I think that's fine. Lots of people are going to Amazon anyway. Posting your own affiliate link to a site like this and not disclosing affiliation is a little skeezy.
Since then, I've changed our merch page around to aggregate eBay searches, and now make about the same from casual viewers as I did when the merch page was Amazon-centric.
I also make $20-$60 a month from tshirt commissions through Goodrock.
I'm certainly not quitting my day job, but I like that this hobby of mine has become self-sustaining.
End result? I sold 4 kindles, and made about $120. Not bad, but don't expect high conversion rates on this kind of thing.
I think it's disingenuous to use affiliate links if someone said, "Hey, where can I buy a Kindle?" or "what's the best ebook reader I can buy online?". But in this case, if you saw this link and said "Oh crap! This is news to me and I've been waiting for a price drop" . . . then by all means kirse deserves an affiliate payout.
2. Get people on mechanical turk to upmod your submission until it takes off
3. Profit?
In my opinion, lines are crossed when you suggest a less than optimal solution/link because it'll earn you more money. For example - on my NIN site, when an album becomes available for pre-sale, I list each vendor that we find along with their price, even if they're selling it cheaper than Amazon. If I were to ONLY suggest Amazon for pre-orders when I knew better deals were to be had, that's where I feel one starts losing ethics points.
I think the bottom line, for a site like HN, or a message board, or anything like that -- it's up to the owner/administrator of the site. I don't know how much work goes into the administration of HN, but the content is almost entirely crowdsourced. Were it my site, I'd probably strip (but not replace) all affiliate code from links, but I don't really think it's unethical to have posted that to HN with a link. Were it me, I'd have commented in the interest of full disclosure.
And that's pretty much all I was doing with my first post - disclosing something that may be of interest to readers here :)
I just wanted to comment mainly because I always see people going way out of their way to disclose affiliate links (and conversely -- people pouncing on undisclosed ones like they've found a witch) and I always think "do people really get so offended by them?". But yeah, I totally agree that it's wrong to recommend a sub-optimal product b/c you're an affiliate.
And why would GSM/CDMA matter at all? It's not as if you're paying for the service...
I use my Kindles (K1 and DX, I've seen other people with K2...I'll probably buy one myself for completeness) here in Afghanistan, and am probably going to set up a semi-pirate 1xRTT network, as USB gets old fast. The K1 only does EVDO (for which BTS gear is expensive), but the K2/DX do 1xRTT, so you can hack firmware on some of the consumer femtocells to remove GPS checks or spoof GPS.
As for the wi-fi, I have a big library sitting on my network and it would not fit in a Kindle.
As for the wi-fi, I have a big library sitting on my network and it would not fit in a Kindle.