I guess you're not being critical, but I'm going to defend kirse anyway.
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.
Hmm. Getting sidetracked, but how is it disingenuous to use your affiliate link when someone asks you where to buy a Kindle? They're only available on Amazon, and it doesn't raise the price at all if they buy through an affiliate link.
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 :)
yeah, Kindle's not a good example -- I was lazy to use that.
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.
I see no excuse for dropping an affiliate link on a submission to HackerNews. It applies not just to the kindle, but anything one would buy after follwoing the link to Amazon, and even at a later time when purchase is not even related to this article. I visit comments first, before link, but I'm sure many others would be impacted. Affiliate links should be discouraged altogether on a site like this, and worthy of banning/suspension.
Does that actually make any money though? I often wonder what the purpose of chasing a few bucks here and there is if it doesn't make much and isn't scalable.
Back when people bought CDs, I'd make several grand in the course of a week each time Nine Inch Nails album preorders went live on Amazon & I posted links on my (well-known among fans) website. Heck, I made $500 off MP3 downloads of the Ghosts album when that came out. This allowed me to get better hosting, and to send money to other people who've helped me with the site, as well as fund contests for readers.
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.
In the interest of diffusing knowledge - NIN gives away studio recordings for free these days, and that saw the end of me getting $20-$50 a month from casual user visits to our music/merch page (theninhotline.net/features/merch)
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.
I managed to get my Amazon.com Kindle affiliate link onto the front page of Reddit. It got several hundred upvotes, and based on my experience with Reddit, at least 10,000 clicks.
End result? I sold 4 kindles, and made about $120. Not bad, but don't expect high conversion rates on this kind of thing.
Why? The EV-DO modem is plenty fast and requires no user intervention whatsoever. WiFi in this case would simply add more user configuration with negligible benefits (you're downloading BOOKS, not YouTube videos).
And why would GSM/CDMA matter at all? It's not as if you're paying for the service...
GSM would allow it to be used in markets without EVDO, although Amazon would need to figure out some kind of roaming agreement, flatrate data pricing, etc.
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.
Amazon doesn't need to figure out any roaming deals. i have my own country-wide (and Brazil is pretty wide) data plan and adding one more device would be trivial.
As for the wi-fi, I have a big library sitting on my network and it would not fit in a Kindle.
Amazon doesn't need to figure out any roaming deals. i have my own country-wide (and Brazil is pretty wide) data plan and adding one more device would be trivial.
As for the wi-fi, I have a big library sitting on my network and it would not fit in a Kindle.
And, while we are at it, please include some wi-fi in the bundle. It's a shame to market it to students and not letting them use on-campus wi-fi data links. 3G when there is a wifi link available seems such a waste of spectrum...
