I have this idea myself for many years and even had a friend build his funded startup around this concept for the past year or two. The biggest issue is with compliance with the companies. There is a reason the affiliate process is vetted and takes alot of steps to make sure your serious about promoting. You indirectly represent the end company when promoting your aff link. When you have someone blasting their affili…
Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
41–50 of 63 posts
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#42Is there not a US equivalent of Quidco ( http://www.quidco.com )? For genuine friend-to-friend recommendations, I'd rather refer a friend of mine to make a purchase through Quidco and have them claim back the full referral fee themselves (minus a £5/year subscription), than pocket the referral fee myself. If I was linking to a larger group, why should I go through Referly and not set up an affiliate account direct wi…
By contrast, the amount of money I could make from recommending books, movies etc to friends via a Referly would be in the pennies.
To sum up: Quidco, I just remember to login before I buy a big ticket item, and literally make hundreds of pounds. Referly, I have to convert all of my product links to Referly affiliate links in the hope of making pennies.
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#43Now, all I need is an API that a service like Ifttt.com can hook into. I'd like to use this service in between the others I use. (When I Like something on facebook, it gets tweeted, for instance...) I want it to be able to shorten my link and it get tweeted automatically. Doable?
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interstitial or an iframe could be interesting, and provide the disclosure.
Agreed, my personal preference is an iframe from a user experience perspective although from an engineering standpoint this could be a nightmare. The interstitial is somewhat industry standard, but feels very high friction. Thoughts on which is better in your opinion?
EG "[Firstname] thought you'd love [product name] from [vendor]. For spreading the love [firstname] gets a referral fee if you buy! Find out how you can start making money referring friends to products that you love too with Refer.ly today!"
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#45Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#46I have this idea myself for many years and even had a friend build his funded startup around this concept for the past year or two. The biggest issue is with compliance with the companies. There is a reason the affiliate process is vetted and takes alot of steps to make sure your serious about promoting. You indirectly represent the end company when promoting your aff link. When you have someone blasting their affili…
$40 EPC? That would be $40 per every click you get from Twitter.
when you create value, people will click and most likely buy. on twitter, you can see what exactly is on their mind so it becomes pretty transparent what they specifically want when they tweet.
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#47I love it. It sounds like a few people here have been thinking about a similar idea, and you can count me in as well. The truth is, my company would be happy to pay out 10% of any order if it resulted from a genuine recommendation. Of course anyone experienced with the affiliate world can figure out a way to capture that money, but it's not really available to your everyday Facebook user. Maybe Refer.ly will fix that…
That seems to be the case, so they'd have to make a special arrangement with Amazon to do so.
> 9. ... nor will you create links formatted with your Associate’s tag for, or display such links on, a site that is not your site.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forget refer.ly, how is Amazon going to cope with this in general?
I might not be popular here for saying so, but I have to get this off my chest. I think it is a pretty great move by the FTC to make it outright fraud to shill, and I'll tell you why I think so. Please indulge me a little. The reason is that information doesn't generate itself. If you Google BlackHole5000 coffee extruder review , the BlackHole5000 coffee extruder being this great industrial high-pressure coffee maker…
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#49Is there not a US equivalent of Quidco ( http://www.quidco.com )? For genuine friend-to-friend recommendations, I'd rather refer a friend of mine to make a purchase through Quidco and have them claim back the full referral fee themselves (minus a £5/year subscription), than pocket the referral fee myself. If I was linking to a larger group, why should I go through Referly and not set up an affiliate account direct wi…
As far as I know, though, Amazon doesn't participate in any of these, as they don't like "middlemen" dealing with their affiliate program. Wonder if refer.ly will have similar issues down the road with Amazon.
Re: Refer.ly (YC S12) Lets Regular Folks Earn Affiliate Revenue
#50First of all, congratulations on your new venture! Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, refer.ly is basically a middleman. If that's so, I have a couple questions: 1. What incentives do I have to sign up with refer.ly instead of going directly with companies that run affiliate programs? 2. What makes refer.ly different from existing middlemen like Commission Junction?
The key difference right now is that you have 1 signup, and you're done... that's our minimum viable differentiation (for now)
For instance, how are you going to handle the veritable smörgåsbord of unique terms and conditions that come attached to each merchant's affiliate schemes? How are users going to be informed of these terms?
Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to deal with people who violate these terms? What happens when one of your users starts using your links as part of a Google AdWords campaign, bidding on keywords that a merchant specifically prohibits?
What happens when a user starts sending your links in the form of unsolicited emails, or starts offering an incentive for people to make a purchase through a referral link — both practices that are commonly prohibited by affiliate schemes?