Amazon Debauchery

Sunday, 5 December 2004

This site has been somewhat of a trailblazing effort in terms of generating revenue from a weblog via advertising and via paid memberships and T-shirt sales. For absolutely no good reason, however, I’ve never attempted to make some scratch via the most common means for weblogs: affiliate links.

Starting yesterday, that changed. You will now notice in the top right corner of this web page a small text link to Amazon.com. For any purchases made after following this link, Amazon pays me a small referral bonus. It’s worth noting that the referral bonuses come out of Amazon’s end, not yours — you pay Amazon’s regular prices, and Amazon sends a portion (generally around 5 percent) to me.

International readers, take note: I’ve joined the associates programs at Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk as well. Using a pop-up menu on my Preferences page, you can choose which store will be linked to when you visit Daring Fireball. The preferences form also allows you to turn the Amazon links off, if you choose.

Assuming this endeavor is at least mildly successful, I’ll keep the links around in some shape or form. The top-right placement in the banner, however, is something that will only be used for the remainder of the holiday shopping season.

So, here’s the idea: if you’re going to purchase holiday gifts at Amazon and you’d like to support Daring Fireball, please consider using these links to get to Amazon’s web site. After clicking, you’ll proceed to Amazon’s home page, and all purchases you make in the subsequent 24 hours will generate referral bonuses that benefit Daring Fireball.

A 5 percent cut on the price of a book might not seem like much, but I’m hopeful it might add up in the aggregate. (Speaking of books, Revolution in the Valley, Andy Hertzfeld’s new hardcover on the creation of the original Macintosh, is now available for purchase.)

More intriguingly, Amazon is a lot more than just a bookstore now. Point of fact, they’re a terrific Apple reseller — selling a full line of Macs and iPods, at or below Apple’s own prices. (Unfortunately, Amazon.ca doesn’t sell Apple hardware, but Amazon.co.uk does.) Sometimes, Amazon’s prices are significantly below Apple’s. E.g., at this writing, the U.S. Amazon store has the latest iPod models on sale at 5 percent below Apple’s prices:

Or, with Mac hardware, mail-in rebates can save you $100 on iBooks and iMacs. That brings the price on a new 12-inch iBook (1.2 GHz G4, 256 MB RAM, built-in AirPort Extreme, etc.) to only $899. Big-spenders get a $150 rebate on dual 2.5 GHz PowerMacs.

Even though Amazon caps the affiliate bonus at $25 on computer hardware purchases, it’s easy to see how this might add up.

Thanks for clicking.

A Note on URL Bookmarking

If you wish to bookmark my Amazon referral link for quick access within your browser, you need to bookmark the URL used on this page, not the URL you end up with at Amazon. E.g., for the U.S. store this is the URL you need to bookmark:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=daringfirebal-20&path=subst/home/home.html