Changes to outbound links on the forums
Discussion
As many of you will be aware, for the past few years we’ve used a service called Skimlinks to deal with external links posted in our forums. Skimlinks works by attaching a small piece of affiliate code to your outbound link, which means that we’re able to make a small amount of money from any shopping you do when you get there. A typical example might be an outbound link to a product on Amazon or eBay, where we’d be paid a small percentage on any transaction you make in the hours after clicking the link. We don’t use this on any editorial links, only those posted in the forums.
Recently Amazon, alongside eBay one of our biggest revenue earners via Skimlinks, changed their terms and conditions and no longer pay publishers such as us for visits delivered in this way. Whilst the revenues aren’t huge, many publishers are annoyed by this change, and it is being perceived as a bully boy tactic by Amazon. Many small publishers and blogs rely on incremental revenues such as this to cover their costs, and whilst we’re not in that category, we have sympathy for their position and this is one of the ways we monetise our forum traffic.
Skimlinks have worked to create a way for us to be able to continue to monetise these outbound links, and we’re deploying it today. We think that it does nothing to detract from the browsing experience, and in fact might be said to offer some improvement. From today you’ll continue to see the link in a post, but after it you’ll see alternative places where you can buy the same product (including Amazon UK with our affiliate code attached). These are short text links (no more than 3 per link) which don’t impact the user experience in any way - no nasty hover over behaviour, no images, no animation. You can click on them if you wish, or you can simply click on the link posted by the user.
Here’s how a link looked before:
And here’s how a link will look from now on:
The widget which Skimlinks uses to put these links in relies on the page being cached. In laymans terms that means that if you’re the first person to look at a post you might not see these additional links, but they’ll appear shortly after that.
Other big enthusiast forums (notably Avforums) have already made this change and it was uncontroversial for their users. We hope that you’ll feel the same way about PistonHeads doing it, but in the spirit of openness we felt it was important to be very clear about why this change has been made.
Thanks,
Stuart
Recently Amazon, alongside eBay one of our biggest revenue earners via Skimlinks, changed their terms and conditions and no longer pay publishers such as us for visits delivered in this way. Whilst the revenues aren’t huge, many publishers are annoyed by this change, and it is being perceived as a bully boy tactic by Amazon. Many small publishers and blogs rely on incremental revenues such as this to cover their costs, and whilst we’re not in that category, we have sympathy for their position and this is one of the ways we monetise our forum traffic.
Skimlinks have worked to create a way for us to be able to continue to monetise these outbound links, and we’re deploying it today. We think that it does nothing to detract from the browsing experience, and in fact might be said to offer some improvement. From today you’ll continue to see the link in a post, but after it you’ll see alternative places where you can buy the same product (including Amazon UK with our affiliate code attached). These are short text links (no more than 3 per link) which don’t impact the user experience in any way - no nasty hover over behaviour, no images, no animation. You can click on them if you wish, or you can simply click on the link posted by the user.
Here’s how a link looked before:
And here’s how a link will look from now on:
The widget which Skimlinks uses to put these links in relies on the page being cached. In laymans terms that means that if you’re the first person to look at a post you might not see these additional links, but they’ll appear shortly after that.
Other big enthusiast forums (notably Avforums) have already made this change and it was uncontroversial for their users. We hope that you’ll feel the same way about PistonHeads doing it, but in the spirit of openness we felt it was important to be very clear about why this change has been made.
Thanks,
Stuart
Ha!
To be honest AVF isn't a forum I frequent but I can imagine that the typical hifi enthusiast is more pedantic than the norm - are they that bad then?!
Really, if you have an issue with the solution then we'd love to know about it. We've firmly resisted the various keyword highlight advertising products because we think they're dreadful, and that includes Skimlinks' own product. I think that this is at worst unobtrusive, and at best a way of seeing the lowest price for a product.
Happy to accept that people might not agree though, and if this solution isn't right, then we'll rethink it.
To be honest AVF isn't a forum I frequent but I can imagine that the typical hifi enthusiast is more pedantic than the norm - are they that bad then?!
Really, if you have an issue with the solution then we'd love to know about it. We've firmly resisted the various keyword highlight advertising products because we think they're dreadful, and that includes Skimlinks' own product. I think that this is at worst unobtrusive, and at best a way of seeing the lowest price for a product.
Happy to accept that people might not agree though, and if this solution isn't right, then we'll rethink it.
McWigglebum4th said:
Yes, just to clarify: it is only doing this to Amazon links because it is only Amazon who've changed their policy. If you click on that eBay link we'd still earn a small fee from eBay for anything you ended up buying from the site.
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