I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.
I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.
So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.
My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.
This is called cookie stuffing and it's not only against TOS but also fraudulent and very illegal. You're stealing money from Amazon. The owners of Digitalpoint just got charged with wire fraud for this practice. If ethics don't concern you, you should stop simply because of the low relative reward and high risk.
It would surprise me if Amazon doesn't have an effective automated way of detecting this. It would be easy to detect based on user behaviour when they hit the Amazon page, and Amazon isn't known for throwing money away like that.
hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.
That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.
yea I run a couple book sites and one time a person clicked on one of my book links and ended up buying a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. Jackpot!
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I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.
I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.
So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.
My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.
This is called cookie stuffing and it's not only against TOS but also fraudulent and very illegal. You're stealing money from Amazon. The owners of Digitalpoint just got charged with wire fraud for this practice. If ethics don't concern you, you should stop simply because of the low relative reward and high risk.
It would surprise me if Amazon doesn't have an effective automated way of detecting this. It would be easy to detect based on user behaviour when they hit the Amazon page, and Amazon isn't known for throwing money away like that.
I'm completely baffled by this too. I was awaiting being kicked from the Amazon partner program month ago - yet it's still running.
Yes, Indeed. You could be charged with a criminal offence for that kind of activity.
Not only is this unethical, it could land you in jail.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y10/m08/i11/s01
hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.
That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.
yea I run a couple book sites and one time a person clicked on one of my book links and ended up buying a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. Jackpot!
Yep. Peddled everything from "sensual massage devices" (which I had no idea Amazon carried) to e-books.