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It is kind of strange that online shops are in with this. I mean the links are there anyway, there is no additional benefit for the shops but they still have to
by herbst 10y ago
It is kind of strange that online shops are in with this. I mean the links are there anyway, there is no additional benefit for the shops but they still have to pay additional costs in that way.
- Nokinside 10y agoIt's only odd if the traffic to affiliated sites is not mysteriously increasing.
- rwmj 10y agoI wonder what's in it for Amazon to continue with affiliate links. It was clever in the early days when Amazon wanted everyone to link/visit Amazon and were willing to give out free money to achieve that. But now it's Amazon paying to maintain a network of spammers, click hijackers and dishonest reviewers. What's in it for Amazon now?
- yclept 10y agoI think those same things are still incentivizing the program.
- MicroBerto 10y agoI think about this frequently, but they recently revamped their associates screens after years of not touching them at all. So I'd say there is a bit more roadmap. My best answer is that right now, they realize it's best not to ruin a great thing. They're on top of the world, things are going well, why rock the boat?
- tomascot 10y agoI guess it could be free promotion, is not unusual for respected sites to publish affiliate links to Amazon. MercadoLibre, one of the biggest ecommerce platform in latam, had an affiliate program, but they cut it when they were "big enough".
- Tiquor 10y agoVigilink sits between them, the shop doesn't have to be explicitly in on it.
- herbst 10y agoWell. Kind of all the big affiliate networks have opt-out options, and reddit for sure will generate enough traffic to get noticed.
- rbinv 10y agoSomewhat true. The question is basically, "what's the incremental value?", especially since all those links would be posted nonetheless. I guess it might make sense to view this as some sort of avoided opportunity cost: reddit could potentially redirect existing product links (say, to a CPU at Newegg) to a different shop.
- nlh 10y agoIt's a bit of a weird thing that's happening, but you're right - there isn't a direct incremental benefit. BUT - like many economic systems, it's about competition. Yes, yesterday it was free to have a link coming back to your site, but today one of your competitors is upping the bid for that link from 0% to 5%. You can either continue to pay 0%, but you might find that your competitors links get more traffic than yours, so you'll need to either up your bid or accept the new reality.
- function_seven 10y agoBut the person "selling" the link is not the same as the person posting it. If I link to something on reddit, I get paid $0 either way, so there's no reason for me to choose an affiliated merchant over a non-affilated one. In fact, I won't even know which ones are or aren't participating.
- arielm 10y agoThat's a really valid point, especially if they agree not to collect additional personal information... My guess is that they kind of have to because they have an agreement with the 3rd party that's handling this.