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Reddit can be monetised today, right now, without a single intrusive advert. The key is affiliate programs. Go talk to Skimlinks, point out your traffic, laug

by buro9 16y ago

Reddit can be monetised today, right now, without a single intrusive advert. The key is affiliate programs. Go talk to Skimlinks, point out your traffic, laugh at their rates and then stop to think for a moment. If reddit signed up to every affiliate program there was and didn't share revenue with skimlinks or anyone... if reddit took care of explaining what they were doing and how they were doing it... the readership would be fine. Hell, you want me just to use the site as normal and inadvertently through doing so I end up clicking links that lead me to buy stuff occasionally and this gives you some pennies. Sure thing, doesn't bother me. Pennies, yeah, that's all it is. Except that's a penny or two per click. Reddit has size and traffic. Reddit could link to the odd item here or there behind affiliate paywalls and those unobtrusive and naturally organic links created by virtue of creating such a large community could monetise the whole thing. Don't believe me? Try it for one month. And then when your jaw hits the flaw remember to give me some credit for it. Affiliate schemes keep most forums alive and allow them to exist with minimal advertising. There, I've let my secret out. I run small forums, and they are making me a lovely nest-egg... if I had the cash I'd buy reddit just to put affiliate links on it... it would be an immediate cash cow, and the readership would be fine as they'd understand why, and visually no garbage would have changed the experience. The key is to do all affiliates, leave no penny on any table. Every click that could earn you money, should. Technically all you need is a set of rules to process any existing link in any post or comment, and to detect whether that URL goes to a destination that has an affiliate program. If it does, strip any existing codes and drop in yours, if it doesn't then leave it alone. Oh,and tell people explicitly not to game it. No-one need ever create fake clicks or fake atricles. The organic mass is enough.

tamersalama 16y ago
If it's that easy, why isn't everyone doing it?
- buro9 16y ago
  Most people are so busy running the community, taking part, adding features and generally caring for it that they don't really see this. If you look at financially successful forums you tend to only see what is visible, the adverts. But actually most successful forums make way more revenue from affiliate schemes than they do from the adverts. Affiliate schemes are almost invisible to the end user, unless you're looking for them in the links on the site you won't even notice them. Just look at this company: http://www.internetbrands.com/ http://www.internetbrands.com/ All it owns and runs are forums. It may not be sexy or cool, but there is a lot of money in it and reddit is a great site and really shouldn't have a problem.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Do you mean to say that the forums rewrite the URLs the users paste in such a way, or that the links on the forum itself (vs. the links in posts) are affiliate marketing?
    - buro9 16y ago
      Yes, exactly that. Not at all of them do it, but for the motoring section a large number rewrite the eBay ones because the value of a click-through on a high ticket item like a car is enormous (relative to the affiliate fee for a book or CD). There's only two ways to pull it off: 1) You audience is kinda dumb and doesn't know (wouldn't work on reddit), or 2) You just come clean and say you're going to do it as it is one of the most viable ways in which to make the site fund itself and to produce a profit (which would work on reddit because it's not intrusive and wouldn't change what people are doing already). In the latter case you need to make sure no-one games it. There is enough click fraud detection to make this the next problem... once you've tapped into a gushing well of money you really need to make sure that the actions of your own community don't turn it off. Which effectively means trying to make sure that no-one is gaming your system (with best intentions to help you) with fake click-throughs. But even there, a work-around is to provide your own proxy to the click traffic and to run something to detect abnormal traffic... if it looks to be outside of a set of parameters, strip out the affiliate info and redirect as normal. This minimises the risk of losing the revenue stream once it's been acquired.
      - StavrosK 16y ago
        The more I hear about this, the more I think that reddit could pull it off. If they came clean, I really doubt there would be any discontent at all. The only problem might be that most of the links are imgur links nowadays, but they could make lots of money even from the occasional amazon review link. If they stuck to pay-per-action affiliate links, like Amazon's, for example, they wouldn't even need to police it for gaming (I don't think Amazon would mind people buying things to help reddit out).
StavrosK 16y ago
Well there's an idea for historious! Seriously, though, while users might rebel against this in many communities (rewriting their links to make you money sounds bad), I think reddit could easily pull this off, as it's not immoral or in any way reprehensible. Besides, the community has been very understanding and accommodating time and time again. I don't know about reddit, but this idea sounds like a goldmine for my own sites. Thanks!
- buro9 16y ago
  It couldn't work for historious. Your ability to store a cache of a whole page is based on the same safe harbour that Google use to provide their cache. Namely that you merely act as a cache and the page is unmodified in any way. Modify the page, and you no longer have that safe harbour, now you'd have taken content from elsewhere and re-purposed it to have affiliate click-throughs... you'd have no defence to copyright infringement claims. Historious has to store and present the cached page unmodified.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Oh, no, not the cache. There's much more opportunity in the links themselves. You historify an amazon item to go back to it later, and when you click the link to go there, our affiliate tag is inserted. Besides, you don't look at the cache when shopping, you look at the links. I already pushed an initial version of this yesterday, it leaves your cache alone, is unobtrusive and gives us some extra money as you normally use the service. If it goes well, we can even think about removing the limit for free users!
    - buro9 16y ago
      That works, in fact that use is going to be fine. For your size, you probably would benefit from just applying skimlinks as they would give you a slice of revenue that you're not tapping into. Once you go beyond a certain amount of traffic, ditch skimlinks and do it yourself. They take too much revenue.

by buro9 16y ago

tamersalama 16y ago

If it's that easy, why isn't everyone doing it?

buro9 16y ago
Most people are so busy running the community, taking part, adding features and generally caring for it that they don't really see this. If you look at financially successful forums you tend to only see what is visible, the adverts. But actually most successful forums make way more revenue from affiliate schemes than they do from the adverts. Affiliate schemes are almost invisible to the end user, unless you're looking for them in the links on the site you won't even notice them. Just look at this company: http://www.internetbrands.com/ http://www.internetbrands.com/ All it owns and runs are forums. It may not be sexy or cool, but there is a lot of money in it and reddit is a great site and really shouldn't have a problem.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Do you mean to say that the forums rewrite the URLs the users paste in such a way, or that the links on the forum itself (vs. the links in posts) are affiliate marketing?
  - buro9 16y ago
    Yes, exactly that. Not at all of them do it, but for the motoring section a large number rewrite the eBay ones because the value of a click-through on a high ticket item like a car is enormous (relative to the affiliate fee for a book or CD). There's only two ways to pull it off: 1) You audience is kinda dumb and doesn't know (wouldn't work on reddit), or 2) You just come clean and say you're going to do it as it is one of the most viable ways in which to make the site fund itself and to produce a profit (which would work on reddit because it's not intrusive and wouldn't change what people are doing already). In the latter case you need to make sure no-one games it. There is enough click fraud detection to make this the next problem... once you've tapped into a gushing well of money you really need to make sure that the actions of your own community don't turn it off. Which effectively means trying to make sure that no-one is gaming your system (with best intentions to help you) with fake click-throughs. But even there, a work-around is to provide your own proxy to the click traffic and to run something to detect abnormal traffic... if it looks to be outside of a set of parameters, strip out the affiliate info and redirect as normal. This minimises the risk of losing the revenue stream once it's been acquired.
    - StavrosK 16y ago
      The more I hear about this, the more I think that reddit could pull it off. If they came clean, I really doubt there would be any discontent at all. The only problem might be that most of the links are imgur links nowadays, but they could make lots of money even from the occasional amazon review link. If they stuck to pay-per-action affiliate links, like Amazon's, for example, they wouldn't even need to police it for gaming (I don't think Amazon would mind people buying things to help reddit out).

StavrosK 16y ago

Well there's an idea for historious! Seriously, though, while users might rebel against this in many communities (rewriting their links to make you money sounds bad), I think reddit could easily pull this off, as it's not immoral or in any way reprehensible. Besides, the community has been very understanding and accommodating time and time again. I don't know about reddit, but this idea sounds like a goldmine for my own sites. Thanks!

buro9 16y ago
It couldn't work for historious. Your ability to store a cache of a whole page is based on the same safe harbour that Google use to provide their cache. Namely that you merely act as a cache and the page is unmodified in any way. Modify the page, and you no longer have that safe harbour, now you'd have taken content from elsewhere and re-purposed it to have affiliate click-throughs... you'd have no defence to copyright infringement claims. Historious has to store and present the cached page unmodified.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Oh, no, not the cache. There's much more opportunity in the links themselves. You historify an amazon item to go back to it later, and when you click the link to go there, our affiliate tag is inserted. Besides, you don't look at the cache when shopping, you look at the links. I already pushed an initial version of this yesterday, it leaves your cache alone, is unobtrusive and gives us some extra money as you normally use the service. If it goes well, we can even think about removing the limit for free users!
  - buro9 16y ago
    That works, in fact that use is going to be fine. For your size, you probably would benefit from just applying skimlinks as they would give you a slice of revenue that you're not tapping into. Once you go beyond a certain amount of traffic, ditch skimlinks and do it yourself. They take too much revenue.