Links With Referral Compensation

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Links With Referral Compensation

Full disclosure.

Sometimes links with referral compensation are used in posts on OL. When they are from me, this usually means I receive a commission from them.

For example, as an Amazon Associate I (MSK) earn from qualifying purchases. Following the guidelines of Amazon I will mark them "(paid link)." Amazon just sent me a notice about this. I don't know if this notice was general or specific to me, but I do know that Amazon now uses artificial intelligence to monitor this stuff. So this post is to keep things going strictly by the book.

Unfortunately, Amazon referral links have never resulted in much income, but what comes in goes to help pay for this site.

As I come across Amazon links in past posts, I will add this new "(paid link)" notice. The site is just too big with too much accumulated content to stop everything and do this of all links ever published. If this becomes a problem for Amazon, I will simply remove it from OL.

In the future, we will probably have more links with referral compensation from different companies. I will indicate them as they occur.

For the longest time, we used Google's Adsense, but once Google started manipulating algorithms and so on based on politics, I took Adsense off. Besides, the ads were intrusive, hardly anybody clicked on them, and the diminishing income was just not worth it.

(I will use Adsense on other sites, though. But only where politics and/or public policies are not part of the content, the traffic is good, and the visitor culture is to click on ads.)

For the future, I don't ever want links or ads to be as gawdawful on OL as they were before. 

But be advised, sometimes there are and will be ads and paid links in posts and/or elsewhere on the site.

Michael