Our Amazon Advertising Experiment

blog.stackoverflow.com

13 points·phsr··2 comments

We now auto-insert Stack Overflow affiliate info into any amazon book links posted on Stack Overflow

I'm curious how others feel about this. To me, it seems like Stack Overflow is taking the affiliate credit for something that a user posts. I personally don't use Stack Overflow but if I did I would be a little annoyed that they are making money off of the work that I did to find a book for someone.

On the other hand, all of the comments I saw on Stack Overflow seemed to indicate that people really liked it [1].

1. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting...

I'm a moderately regular (though infrequent) stack overflow user, and I think it's great. I am perhaps biased because some of the work I do is supported by affiliate advertising (though at this point not very much!). And our affiliate links aren't munged onto user-contributed content.

Anyway, aside from my bias, I think it's great in part because it makes Stack Overflow money and I Think they deserve that, and in part because it has zero impact on the content the user contributed. It was already a link to Amazon. If anyone follows that link, Amazon is likely to profit and the only reason anyone would follow that link is because it's on Stack Overflow.

I'm not sure how I feel about users adding their own affiliations, since in that case they might be taking advantage of Stack Overflow's traffic. I'm also not sure how I then feel about Stack Overflow replacing existing affiliate links with their own (and I don't know how they are handling that situation anyway).

It definitely seems a grey area, but I think in this particular case SO is not abusing their users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com