Comment by CryoLogic
6 years ago
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.
Is affiliate stuffing adding any value? In most cases, it doesn't seem to drive more customers towards the business paying the affiliate commission.
It might. For example, it was one of the potential revenue sources for Bagcheck to keep it running such that people could post their product reviews to the service. Without that revenue it is possible it isn't feasible to run the service and that would decrease the number of reviews pointing to them which could reduce the number of sales they get.
Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.
Yeah it is definitely possible it was just a coincidence. But that was a couple years ago, and if Amazon has taught me anything it's that backstabbing is definitely part of the culture in many of these tech companies.
While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.
Metafilter has had it for, oh, looks like almost 13 years:
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...
Think of it from another angle: You're interviewing this guy that has this idea that would be hugely rewarding for you with a payout of n% if you proposed it via the internal idea program. No one will notice. Or hire that guy and leave that to him.
I worked for a medium-sized community that did this in 2009, I think. At the time, I don't remember it being novel.
they did have examples of individual contributors doing it, and had been wishy washy on who should benefit from affiliate links for a long time prior