Most charities aren’t very good affiliates.They’ve always done a bad job of explaining the program, as evidenced by the fact that many people (including me) were surprised that the aggregate donation number was so big.Programs that involved a lot of people and time got harder to justify. The new management at Amazon is aggressively streamlining programs and expenses to enable focus and increased profitability.And yet, half a billion dollars makes them a very significant donor in aggregate, one of the biggest corporate donors in the world. That’s not a ‘donation’ of course, it’s simply an allocation of marketing spend. To date, Amazon Smile has sent charities more than $500,000,000. I used to send you, my esteemed readers, to Smile links, but when I realized how little each donation was, I switched to, and so our donations went up 10x. Now, that $100 purchase turned into forty cents sent to the cause of your choice. Smile turned more than a million non-profit charities into affiliates at a bargain rate. The end result is that Amazon has paid many billions of dollars in affiliate fees, and their affiliates (like Wirecutter, CoolTools, and formerly, Squidoo) sometimes built entire businesses around the simple idea that recommending a product and sending someone to the biggest online retailer to buy it could lead to income. It also usually turned one sale into a few… That meant they had little chance of actually turning a profit on that sale, but it led to millions of new customers, people who came back again and again. If a consumer bought a $100 item that someone in their program linked to, they would pay the referrer about $5. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, it’ll be great PR and we’ll also make a profit on every sale because we won’t need to pay a full commission…”Īmazon didn’t invent the online affiliate concept, but the company certainly turned it into a significant engine for growth. “Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. I’m pretty sure how the first meetings went almost a decade ago:
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