How I Made $3,000 with 90 Lines of Code

[jacquesm]

> Svpply and Pinterest both replaced/appended these affiliate ID's on any Amazon links saved on their platform.

Imagine ISPs doing something like that.

[downandout]

You can always bounce the links off of your server first to avoid this affiliate hijacking that Pinterest & others do. Post a link to a page on your server that has a javascript redirect to the affiliate page. This fools the Pinterest bot that follows shortened links looking for http redirects to affiliate URLs.

[jedanbik]

It's pretty common for sites to change referal links like this. I think the rationale is "my site, my bandwidth, my referral money." Can't argue with that!

[jakub_g]

Not exactly the same, but I remember reading (likely on HN) about some ISPs serving adsense-filled pages in case the DNS lookup couldn't resolve the address.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

As someone who operates a free service, this is a very unintrusive way to get some extra revenue and I wouldn't complain about it if you want to see these kinds of sites stick around :)

[pokpokpok]

amazon would discontinue their account because the isp isn't providing value to them

[aw3c2]

Apples and oranges.

[vomitcuddle]

very nice. made about $600 on pinterest this way before they started replacing affiliate ids. nice idea with using curated product lists, i was grabbing random products from a few selected categories (clothing, electronics, sports equipment, etc.) using amazon's own product advertising api. right now selling "user-friendly" GUI tools to do this sort of thing on "black hat SEO" forums seems to be a more lucrative business. i used my own python script which i later ported to c# for better threading support (this was before node.js was cool).

[Breefield]

I wish I'd obscured the amazon links behind bitly, or my own server, or anything!

[gopi]

This kind of stories are common in the affiliate world or atleast it used to be...In 2003 i wrote a simple perl script which made me over $1 Million!

[meenzu]

wow! Can you explain more about that?

[josephscott]

This is called spam and we certainly don't need more of it.

[kevinbracken]

brilliant. a little grey hat, but very cool nonetheless.

[coledubz]

i don't think hats are even involved here, unless we're living in a world where wget and SVN and incrementing query strings are considered crimes...wait...doh

[webhat]

He got the money and svpply got the DB filled out for SEO purposes. As svpply I would have thanked him.

[aw3c2]

When I looked into Amazon Affiliate codes recently I got the impression that you can only use them on your own site/service. Was that wrong? Can you just get an ID and use it anywhere you like?

[riffraff]

I seem to remember that too, but if you signup with AA then you get a bar when browsing amazon.com that allows you to share links with affiliate tags to twitter and facebook, so presumably that's ok?

[vomitcuddle]

afaik by your own site/service, they also mean your own social media profiles

[coledubz]

I've been considering a markov chain + tumblr/twitter to do this. Generate an "aesthetic" and then use it to grep for products/descriptions, as well as other "content" so as to appear like meat. The more interesting part is seeing if I can write code that acts like a tumblr user...

[evan_]

Please don't. There used to be thousands of these on blogger, it was awful because they'd often show up in google results.