"You will not issue any press release or make any other public communication with respect to this Operating Agreement, your use of the Content, or your participation in the Program."

Interesting, talking about being an affiliate is a violation of the operating agreement.

This should be put to good use with links tagged automatically with some useful organization and overwriting others to remove any financial incentive to comment.

EFF has an affiliate tag "electronicfro-20".

I added a custom search provider to Chrome with an affiliate tag for an organization I like to support, so whenever I want to find something on Amazon I just type "a [query]" and it automatically applies the affiliate tag and takes me to the search results.

Here's the URL for EFF (with "%s" for Chrome search templates):

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

I was thinking about Amazon affiliate referrals for charity just the other days after a friend posted his charity's Amazon Smile referral link. Of course the Smile payout is a fraction of what the affiliate percentage pays. I was thinking about just having a page of with maybe the current top 50 items (five rows of ten) for the week in Amazon's sales rank - as cards with thumbnail and name/price/rating. Then I'd rotate through charities each week based on visitor input, verify the week's haul for them and cut a check to the charity. An alternative to the top 50 items would be to incorporate items related to LifeHacker's "best times to buy" lists. I figured I should just double check the TOS first and haven't had the chance. It's interesting to see others thinking about this.

They closed down all charity and affiliate related projects and replaced them with smile to make it cheaper. aflattr.com + socialvest.com

There are services that will automatically insert a target affiliate tag into every link with an affiliate program, even overriding any existing affiliate tag.

But you need to be careful; Pinterest made news a while back for using a service like this (Skimlinks), without telling people, and it was a bit of a brouhaha.

Hm. I wonder how Amazon/other affiliates see this? I mean, it's obviously different from, but reminds me of, those malware operators/dodgy ISP's injecting their own referral id into links.

Is there any precedent of sites with user submitted content doing it on their own sites?

Yes, lots of it. There are even service (e.g, Viglink - http://viglink.com/) that specialize in replacing/modifying affiliate links automatically.

What the companies running the referral programs think of these services is unknown. I can't imagine they like it...

Amazon actively shutsdown projects, which automaticly replace affiliate links. Most still running projects are just too small to be noticed yet.

This was how pinterest was making money at one point IIRC -- they stopped after people started turning on the idea.

Affiliate links seem pretty interesting but I'm not sure they're actually positive for the consumer. In some cases it's a way to support legitimate content but I've seen too many "reviews" that were actually advertisements.

Like ideally you want to use ads to make good content free and inform people about products they actually want. I'm working on something kind of related to affiliate links (users make money) but the affiliate's motivation is centered around getting their own content seen, so hopefully we're aligning goals of visitors and posters (make something great, get paid).

EDIT: Planning to post something more substantial to HN but here's a preview for people in this thread https://surfer.io/

While I appreciate the insight into the results, I think it be extremely bad for HN to encourage or allow this practice. I've upvoted your submission in the hopes that it gains further attention, and flagged it and the post containing the affiliate link.

I realize this affiliate links are a divisive issue, but my hope is that they will be reviewed and your account will be banned. I don't know whether others agree with me, but I think adding affiliate links to comments here is uncivil and intolerable behaviour.

I believe it's against Amazon's Terms of Service. They're bigger than you are and they will sue you if you violate their TOS. So check it out!

And even if you do not yet violate their TOS, they do change them to their liking and kick you out anyway. Relying on Amazon as a partner is not really something I can recommend.

So basically if i link to a horse mask like this http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003G4IM4S?tag=t0c8f-20 on hacker news, it will make money (Ill donate anything I get from this to Glide), I wonder what the most successful hacks you can do with this are... writing a pinterest chrome app? a reddit app?

How long after clicking on an affiliate link do purchases count for? And does each successively clicked affiliate link override the previous one? Also, as an affiliate, do you see any metadata, or just which items were purchased overall?

I like the EFF idea posted in a few other comments, but I'm wondering how affiliate links are handled in general.

Money is credited to the affiliate account after the product gets shipped; so that's around 24 hours.

Yes, each successively clicked affiliate link overwrites the previous one.

Any metadata? No, affiliates just see which items were purchased and the quantities.

Hope that helps.

That's interesting - thanks!

Would be interesting to know how you go after this post, too. I imagine more people will click through to the original post after this.

This is not the same than posting a blog link with Adsense on it? The content is being presented and someone is getting a few cents...

Sorry for the bad formatting on the table I apparently don't know how to mark down to get the tabs for a psuedo table.

The comments on HN are not parsed as markdown.

* case (newline) * in (newline) * point (newline)

Double asterisk for bold? Nope.

[Link](http://google.com)

I believe the only formatting options are these:

1) encloded by single asterisk = italics

2)

    four leading spaces for <pre> / monospaced
    great for code, quotes, etc.

Close. You only need two or more leading spaces. Here's the list of formatting options: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc