Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Clear which cookies specifically, Karen? Cookies are extremely useful - I'm certainly not going to wipe out all the useful information that's stored about the sites I visit!
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In Chrome, you can choose to just delete the last couple of days (firefox only gives me one day).
Specifically, it's the Amazon cookies you want to remove. Doing that by hand is a major pain.
What I usually do is go thru now and then and mark cookies that should be kept, even when clearing - then I can just clear "all time" and not lose too many.
Keep in mind -
if you've picked up a single cookie in the last 24 hours for Amazon, that affiliate gets 'credited' with the free books you purchase, even though you are using affiliate-free links here at MR.
You can use a separate browser just for Amazon, for those concerned about clearing cookies and who also want to not penalize (or profit) affiliates.
I'm making some changes in my blog, so stay tuned. Hopefully it will allow posting of the free books (if not quite as conveniently for anyone) without killing all earnings. I've been running some tests on tracking id the last couple of days - earnings from those clicking on freebies is generally low and I would not mind sacrificing them (which is what will have to be done, as free book purchases can quickly overwhelm the "80% threshhold" and numbers that Amazon has set, even for a blog of my size - the others mentioned above must hit that limit in a single day).
There are things Amazon could do to eliminate the issue. Such as, for example, just expiring someones tracking cookie/session if they buy a free book. I think all the book bloggers would be satisfied with that. We'd lose a little income, but not the entire amount (and Amazon would see more clearly that free sales referrals are not making up the bulk of our earnings; I'm not sure, though, that that is the case for the mega-freebie-feed/email sites).
There are places now using/selling "post-generation" scripts, that can automate thousands of posts a day, to fill up feeds or emails, pointing at the free books (plus the sites many of use are familiar with). They were no doubt behind some of the pinterest spamming that went on until P started stripping all affiliate tags for amazon links. These guys were no doubt a major part of the issue with "bad" traffic to Amazon (ie, people that bought free books and never anything else).