While I did make and launch http://browseforacause.com a few months ago (which this may or may not have been inspired from), I welcome this launching - any innovation to donate more money to charity can really only be a good thing.
Thanks for the kind words. I can tell you they didn't find out about browseforacause till after they'd started working on browsarity. They started out doing something else with affiliate links and it morphed into this.
There are quite a few competitors in this affiliate-charity donating space. I launched mine: shopwisely.org almost two years ago. I don't really maintain it anymore so all luck to browsarity and hopefully they turn out more successful than my venture.
The problem with all these programs is that its arguable if this generates any value for the company's paying the affiliate fees. Usually a company is not happy with the idea of paying for a customer they already (would have) had.
However, sites like skimlinks seem to be growing (and staying in business) which I think surprised alot of people.
Lets all not forget that these programs mainly survive around 2 affiliate programs- eBay and Amazon. Getting canned from either would be disaster.
I think you're dead on about eBay and Amazon being the main sources of income, but we should give them a chance to address this. You have to figure they thought of this on day 1.
Specifically, I think this is not moot: "arguable if this generates any value"
Making the association that buying from Amazon == donating to charity is worth money to them.
Also, at least with eBay, the big money in affiliate revenue is signing up new users. You get paid about ~1.5% of the transaction price vs. $25 every time a new user places a bid (they don't even have to win). So at worst these companies are paying the big bonus once, and they're still making a profit on every sale.
tl;dr: there is a value add here, unlike than cookie dropping.
for starters its viral.. it tracks not only how much you brought in, but how much everyone you've invited brought in, and how much everyone they've invited brought in etc.
I meant this, specifically: "it tracks not only how much you brought in, but how much everyone you've invited brought in, and how much everyone they've invited brought in etc."
Obviously if their viral loop works that will make the product. I'm saying the above will have no impact on whether their product is viral or not (speaking from experience). I'd even be willing to bet on an A/B test against their viral coefficient.
I read the original comment to say, "We are different because we show you the number of dollars your whole social network brings in." That's cool. I like numbers. But that feature isn't rocket fuel.
Instead I should have taken it to mean, "We're not that different in principle, but we're focused on making charitable giving viral, like Causes for the web at large."
Yes, but the name of the product is "Browsarity," which is a portmanteau of browser and charity. And the positioning on the landing page is about giving, donating, etc.
So I guess my question is, is this actually a charity?
Well, ok, I should be fair. That's a rhetorical question, because I'm 99% sure the answer is "no." So I suppose my real questions are:
1. Isn't that a conflict of interest?
2. How do I know the money is going where you say it's going?
3. If you're donating this revenue to charities via the affiliate fees you pocket, are you getting the tax benefits of that? i.e., Amazon credits your affiliate account via the activity of your users. You then "donate" that to the Red Cross (or whomever), which comes with tax benefits.
Not necessarily. I don't know if you noticed this detail, but they graphically distinguish their affiliate links (with a red underline). This means their affiliate links do exactly what merchants hope affiliate links will do: draw customers to them. The red link says "click on this and if you buy something we'll donate money to your favorite charity."
Imagine how pleased merchants would be if an existing affiliate site decided to promote their affiliate links with red underlines and to donate 90% of the money to charity.
The visitor's choice of charity no less.
They're definitely reasonable earners, but TBH I think it's a harder sell to say "We'll give the commission to charity" vs "You can have the commission".
One of the secrets is that there's usually a minimum withdrawal limit on cashback sites, eg £20, and unless you get up to that, the money isn't paid out. So what happens is you get tons of accounts abandoned before they get to £20 - this is apparently where most of the profit comes from.
Also I don't think rewriting links on websites is a good idea at all. That's just not nice. Reminds me of that YC company that does a firefox plugin that removes the adverts from google search pages and puts other stuff there instead.
>> "I don't know if you noticed this detail, but they graphically distinguish their affiliate links (with a red underline). This means their affiliate links do exactly what merchants hope affiliate links will do: draw customers to them. The red link says "click on this and if you buy something we'll donate money to your favorite charity."
Are you seriously saying you'd expect this to increase a merchants sales? I'm not so sure. It just cuts into their profit and deceives website owners out of potential money.
How about doing some decent natural language parsing for intent and matching that to a massive database of adverts, and providing it for publishers?
That's a problem that really needs solving. eg "I might look at some flatscreen TVs this w/end" -> list of adverts for flatscreen TVs.
keyword matching only gets you a tiny way, but recognizing real intent and meaning in text would be really valuable I think.
I would not mind someone rewriting links on my site. I am too lazy to join an affiliate program, so nobody gets any money from my links. But since merchants are willing to pay you a certain amount of money for providing a link, it seems wasteful to not collect that. This plugin lets charities get that wasted money -- no effort for the site owner, minimal effort for the user, a bit of money for charity. There are worse things on the Internet than this.
Do you think this, or do you have numbers? If affiliate links hurt the merchant, the merchant can pull them whenever they like. Considering Amazon has gone to court to keep their affiliate program alive, I don't think it's something they're doing because they forgot to take down the web page for some special promotion. I think it probably helps them.
Are you seriously saying you'd expect this to increase a merchants sales?
Yes. The evidence this works is the number of merchants who already offer to donate to charity when you purchase something. And in those cases you don't even get to choose the charity.
That's a completely different case though. If they do it in house they get tax breaks, they get good PR, they get increase in repeat purchases etc.
What do the merchants get from browsarity? They get their profit margin taken away, with the vague statement that those sales may not have existed if it had not been a red underlined link? :/
If I were a merchant I know which I'd choose.
I just don't think this sort of thing can work well.... reminds me of tipjoy
Tax breaks and pr alone would not be enough to make merchants do it. It would also have to actually help convince people to buy. Which it clearly does, considering how well established this technique is. There are some industries, like chocolate, where such offers are not just a promotional technique but are built into the companies' business models.
Wait. My assumption from the story was that they had actual deals with these retailers?
Is that not the case? If not it doesn't seem a smart move seeing as their whole business is based on access to affiliate accounts that can be cancelled at a moments notice for as many reasons as the merchant likes :-)
14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links).
Companies use broad language in TOSes to give themselves maximal power, but ultimately they decide case by case. If some form of affiliate link brings in buyers they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, then it would not be in their interest to prevent it.
Honest question: what does it really take to get an affiliate account shut down?
If I understood how this works, it simply replaces the URL of the affiliate link on the page I'm viewing. If that's all it takes to redirect the affiliate payment, what's there to prevent a rogue Firefox extension that secretly replaces every amazon.com link with one that deposits into the author's account? How about a proxy server that scans for these URLs and rewrites them so they make the server's operator rich?
While it's good to see this being used for a good cause, it feels as if exactly the same method can be serving more nefarious purposes. Perhaps this will require oversight from the whoever runs the affiliate program, and I'm having a hard time imagining how they'd be happy if a third party is taking a cut of these fees.
I believe the issue is that Amazon and others specifically forbid affiliates from overwriting or replacing other affiliates links with their own.
But yes, you are correct, some of the more "successful" (if you can call it that) Windows malware has taken the form of IE6 browser plugins and toolbars that overwrite affiliate links in any page you browse to. I can seriously imagine some enterprising 16 year old somewhere in Eastern Europe making 5-6 figure monthly income from this back in the early 2000s.
Easy fix: Audit a random selection of affiliate referrers by checking for the affiliate code in the actual source of the page. If it isn't there, either disable that affiliate account or check more of that account's referrers, denying credit for any pages that don't contain the affiliate code.
I have to agree here. Rewriting links in the browser probably violates the spirit of affiliation.
A related question: does it re-write links that already have an affiliate id in them? That would be really gauche.
[EDIT] Here's another way of thinking about it: what if they just kept the money and didn't donate to charity? I'm almost sure they'd be shut down. So why does donating to charity make it acceptable?
While I think this is a really cool idea; I wonder what the investment strategy could possibly be for funding a company like this. I have a really hard time envisioning how you go from this to any kind of exit short of acquhire.
(I'm genuinely curious, for anyone who feels like speculating.)
This is very similar to what a local startup here in Ottawa is doing. http://dogoodhq.com/ , they replace your normal advertisements with calls to actions, green initiatives and campaigns from charitable organizations. They also have been nominated for a web award at SXSW for technical achievement I believe.
It's a browser plugin, right? Click install, money trickles into the charity. I would probably use this if the plugin runs on my OS of choice. Why not give a bit of free money to charity?
By the way, shopwisely.org gives 100% of commissions, and is a bookmarklet which works in ie, firefox, chrome, and safari.
But once you get the users on your side you'll have to get the merchants on your side by convincing them it will help business. Also the affiliate communities frown on "stealing" tracking cookies. They hate what UPromise does, even though I've argued it's not wrong at all.
I stopped doing it because I stopped believing in the "world changingness" of the whole idea. a) nonprofits don't like to raise money for the sake of raising money, and it usually took months before the money could be sent out. So they couldn't plan how to use the money raised. b)the idea isn't really better than direct donation except we're introducing a new middleman, and making it less transparent because the merchant now pays charities with money they get from the end consumer.
> Why not give a bit of free money to charity?
I want to mention that it's not really free money. In the end the consumer pays because the merchant pays.
Allows you to donate affiliate fees to charity?! Bullshit. Should read: Forces businesses to donate part of their profit margin to charity and browsarity.
You have an agreement with a shop owner, that you can buy stuff from him wholesale at a discount.
You then hang around in the shop (Maybe in disguise) waiting for customers who are about to buy stuff.
Instead of letting them get on and buy stuff, you accost them, and suggest they let you act as a middle man, and you'll buy it wholesale from the shop keeper, and donate the difference to charity, after you take your cut.
Sounds shady doesn't it. And the shopkeeper is being forced to do it until he finds out about the scam.
Well you can color me skeptical. This is the way I see something like this coming into being:
1. Someone thinks of the clever idea of overwriting non-affiliate urls with an affiliate url of their account.
2. In realizing that no one would ever install this, they think "how can I convince people to add this to their browser and take a cut of the profit?"
3. Charity!
I hope I am way wrong.
And man, the news in here is really becoming a TechCrunch aggregator.
What makes your comment like a TechCrunch comment (and this one even more so) is that instead of giving the startup the benefit of the doubt, you do the same thing in the other direction.
And that's particularly easy to do with a newly launched startup, since the right way to launch most things is to launch very early-- way before what you've built is formidable enough to stand up to determined criticism.
Why don't you try giving the founders the benefit of the doubt instead? I can assure you they'd give a project of yours the same.
I think the comments are just in proportion to how much the idea sucks.
I've said this before (You told me off for moaning about twitvid.io), but I doubt people want to hear the feedback "Yes that's nice dear, lovely" from HN. They want the real opinions of people.
We don't know the founders, so we can't asses them, we can only assess the idea. And this idea is a fundamentally bad one. Hopefully they change it soon enough.
There's a difference between the "benefit of the doubt" and cheerleading.
A lost of these critical comments could be phrased more politely (like "how do you plan to get away with this"), but they're all fundamentally reflective of what a middling idea this is in general, and what a terrible idea this is for anything couched as a 'startup'.
