Affiliate Linkage
My website pulled in quite few bob for a while.

Basically it was an archive of eBay auctions that were in the news but were pulled by the auction site. They were usually people selling stuff that wasn't their’s such as football teams, wives and various DNA related listings. Pretty dull stuff, but it covered by the media so people wanted to see them. Tens of thousands of people a day in fact, it turned out.

Sometimes I would spot a breaking news story about an auction and manage to archive it before it was removed. Most of the time however I would simply have to search "completed listings" and the whole listing would still be sitting there on their servers.

The sneaky bit would be posting a link on eBay to my website using keywords in the heading relevant to the removed auction. People would visit "my auction" and click through to my site to "find the information".

Once on my site they could read a small bit of copy and then "click through to the listing on eBay". Naturally the click back to eBay was an affiliate link.

This paid my mortgage for a couple of years for about half an hour's work a day. Most of my readers were in The States and I ended up on quite a few US radio stations as King Nutter giving the latest from the auction scene. It became cat and mouse with eBay as they kept closing my account and I had to open new ones, but it got to the point where I would open fifty accounts all at once with a new credit card number.

Media interest in eBay faded, but then YouTube came along and started banning vids so I did exactly the same with their keywords. If you entered "Daniella Cicerelli video" (half a million hits one weekend) a short video would play saying "Visit kingnutter.com to see this vid".

Not as lucrative as there was no affiliate incentive, but still good fun. I had Google ads that paid for my server costs at least thrice over. Which may have been the problem...

The site was going really well and about a year ago I had an interview with Google for the position of UK Editor of YouTube.

They seemed very interested about my ingenuity and ability to help users find the content they wanted, so I told them how it all worked.

I soon discovered they were not that impressed. I didn't get the job, YouTube permanently disabled my account and amended their T&Cs to stop people linking to sites containing Google Ads. To be honest it wasn't about the money at this stage and I could have easily dropped the ads. Bypassing their ban by opening any number of accounts was possible too, but it's not as fun without my own username.

I'm not disheartened. I have another idea up my sleeve which will make far bigger bucks if there are any PHP / Data Modellers out there who'd like to lend a hand. And this time no big corporate will be shutting down my accounts.

There was always something fun about getting caught though...
(kingnutter, Wed 6 Aug 2008, 10:42, 2 replies)

*Click*
Simple, brilliant and useful. I always get annoyed when you visit ebay or youtube and the content has been removed. I also like that you did this without screwing the people who were looking for the stuff over.
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Wed 6 Aug 2008, 12:02, closed)

smart
good read. always interesting to see how people are profiting from the internet
(MackanZoor, Wed 6 Aug 2008, 15:57, closed)