Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honestly curious how you envision that affiliate links might create the wrong incentives. There are other ways to make money, but the ones I can think of seem much worse. Advertising sucks and clearly has more wrong incentive problems. Donations are less predictable and disconnected from the usefulness of the site. It seems to me that getting a small cut of "hey this book does look useful, I think I'll buy it!" i…
Ads don't suck. Bad ads suck. I love good ads. I used to wait for ads to appear on my Garena client back in the days when I played DOTA because they were so cool (and useful). If I know my audience, I don't have to compromise privacy to show useful ads clean and neat either (watertight curation is applied here as well). Good ads are relevant. On amazon affiliates: The iron rule of nature is: You get what you reward f…
But it's your site! I hope you do find success with the ad strategy, your site seems useful, and I hope it remains worth your time.