How I Made $3,000 with 90 Lines of Code | Hacker News Reader

How I Made $3,000 with 90 Lines of Code

breefield.com

95 pointsBreefield32 comments

> Svpply and Pinterest both replaced/appended these affiliate ID's on any Amazon links saved on their platform.

Imagine ISPs doing something like that.

It's pretty common for sites to change referal links like this. I think the rationale is "my site, my bandwidth, my referral money." Can't argue with that!

Referly (now defunct), wanted to bring this kind affiliate money to everyone. http://www.businessinsider.com/referly-ceo-on-zombie-startup...

amazon would discontinue their account because the isp isn't providing value to them

Not exactly the same, but I remember reading (likely on HN) about some ISPs serving adsense-filled pages in case the DNS lookup couldn't resolve the address.

Rogers in Canada used to do this. I'm not sure if they still do, though, because that incident alone caused me to switch over to another DNS server.

Funny, I get an error when I try to buy anything on Svpply.

http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/item/salt-1

Yeah, link rot was kind of our Achilles Heel.

I actually recoded the SaturdaysNYC frontend with Ginlane, around the same time I did this. Great team at that agency. http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/

Apples and oranges.

As someone who operates a free service, this is a very unintrusive way to get some extra revenue and I wouldn't complain about it if you want to see these kinds of sites stick around :)

You can always bounce the links off of your server first to avoid this affiliate hijacking that Pinterest & others do. Post a link to a page on your server that has a javascript redirect to the affiliate page. This fools the Pinterest bot that follows shortened links looking for http redirects to affiliate URLs.

So dumb for not doing this.

I don't think this is allowed any longer on amazon and will probably get you banned. I'm not sure though

http://www.groovypost.com/news/amazon-associates-bans-url-sh...

Interesting. The bit that they are talking about is this:

"In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site"

First, your own server is (arguably) not a link shortening service as long as you don't offer that service. Second, if you were really worried about it, you could register a domain for your site called, for example, forwarding-you-to-amazon.com or fantastic-amazon-deals.com, link to it, forward from there. It seems to me that this would be compliant. That couldn't be any more clear that people are going to Amazon.com.

very nice. made about $600 on pinterest this way before they started replacing affiliate ids. nice idea with using curated product lists, i was grabbing random products from a few selected categories (clothing, electronics, sports equipment, etc.) using amazon's own product advertising api. right now selling "user-friendly" GUI tools to do this sort of thing on "black hat SEO" forums seems to be a more lucrative business. i used my own python script which i later ported to c# for better threading support (this was before node.js was cool).

I wish I'd obscured the amazon links behind bitly, or my own server, or anything!

bitly won't work. pinterest follows and "strips" redirects to generate link title and thumbnail. you need to have your own url shortener with pinterest's crawler either blocked or served different content. an interesting idea would be to host the links on a domain/service they can't easily block (i.e. tumblr) and do the redirect to amazon using javascript.

This kind of stories are common in the affiliate world or atleast it used to be...In 2003 i wrote a simple perl script which made me over $1 Million!

wow! Can you explain more about that?

Its just a simple script to generate affiliate SEO'd sales pages from a keyword DB with some markov chain magic to make the page text unique.

This is called spam and we certainly don't need more of it.

brilliant. a little grey hat, but very cool nonetheless.

He got the money and svpply got the DB filled out for SEO purposes. As svpply I would have thanked him.

Wanelo*, but yes, can't really argue with free growth numbers.

i don't think hats are even involved here, unless we're living in a world where wget and SVN and incrementing query strings are considered crimes...wait...doh

When I looked into Amazon Affiliate codes recently I got the impression that you can only use them on your own site/service. Was that wrong? Can you just get an ID and use it anywhere you like?

I seem to remember that too, but if you signup with AA then you get a bar when browsing amazon.com that allows you to share links with affiliate tags to twitter and facebook, so presumably that's ok?

This part was murky yes, but whatever the policy, they didn't shut me down...

afaik by your own site/service, they also mean your own social media profiles

I've been considering a markov chain + tumblr/twitter to do this. Generate an "aesthetic" and then use it to grep for products/descriptions, as well as other "content" so as to appear like meat. The more interesting part is seeing if I can write code that acts like a tumblr user...

Please don't. There used to be thousands of these on blogger, it was awful because they'd often show up in google results.

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