Quote:
Originally Posted by Difflugia
I guess I wasn't clear about why I felt guilty. I have no problem with the affiliate links. I was using eReaderIQ to find the sales, but felt guilty buying them from stores other than Amazon and eReaderIQ wasn't getting a cut. After Amazon canned their account and they turned to other sources of revenue (ads and Patreon), then where I bought the books stopped making a difference to their bottom line.
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OIC.
Usually, I have a very sensitive conscience, but for some reason I haven't felt guilty about using ERIQ the way that I do. I suppose that if I did feel guilty about that, I would not want to post something on MobileRead from most third-party sources (and that makes up probably 95% or more of what I post), because I have to strip the affiliate tags(?) before posting. Got to do some more thinking about the ethics involved there.
The knife cuts both ways. A decade and a half or so, I started a couple of Internet micro used book businesses. I signed up for Amazon's affiliate program on the numerous ads for Amazon that I had scattered over the webpages (I actually had one website, long story, I'l skip the details). Anyway, it was taking a while for the business to build up, as I fully expected. Amazon sent me an email basically telling me that I wasn't sending them
enough business so they were dropping me as an affiliate. Too bad for them, because the business continued to grow to where I was getting quite a few visitors to my website (and shipping out quite a few used books) per day. Health problems are the only thing that caused me to have to close both businesses.
You didn't come right out and say this, but you implied that you didn't like what Amazon did. I will come right out and say it--it shows a lack of loyalty to a website (eReaderIQ.com) that helped send them a lot of business over the years.
Seems like we may have had a conversation similar to this several years ago, but I might be mistaken.
I am not familiar with Patreon--I'll have to Google them.