PSA

[coraa]

Oh, Livejournal.

Someone, probably Livejournal*, has begun hijacking affiliate links. What this means is that when someone posts a link to any of a list of e-commerce sites that have affiliate programs, LJ is adding their own affiliate links... even if the original poster had an affiliate link of their own. This means that the poster isn't getting the kickback, Livejournal is.

This potentially affects a lot of people on my flist, since many of them review books on LJ and provide affiliate links to Amazon and other booksellers. Affiliate links don't provide much money, but they do provide some recompense for the work of 'freelance' reviewing books and other products. Disclosure: I use affiliate links for my Amazon links when I review books myself.

This would be moderately bad to begin with, since it means that LJ is taking the money that a poster would otherwise get, even though it's the poster who chose and linked to and contextualized the product, rather than Livejournal. However, what makes it really irritating is that the change was made with no notification, which means that except by word-of-mouth people won't know why their affiliate payments have vanished, and also (conveniently) won't know to not bother to create the links. It also very well may be against Amazon's TOS. There's also no way to opt out for your own posts, although you can opt out of the LJ 'retargeting' for links you click on. Unfortunately, this means that for a reviewer to get their affiliate payments, it's not enough for them to opt out: they have to hope their readers opt out too. Furthermore, it appears that opting out breaks the stats feature for paid users, which sucks.

For more information on what this means and how to opt out, see this post by telophase. Also, I'd appreciate if you'd follow any e-commerce links in my post from the Dreamwidth mirror.

I hope this is some kind of dreadful mistake, and I will post again to let you know if LJ knocks it off. But I find the bait-and-switch element of this very irritating.

* - It is possible that this is some kind of hack job and the problem isn't on Livejournal's end. If that's true, I would be happy to post a correction. But I'm afraid it seems unlikely.

EDIT: The clever telophase and rachelmanija have discovered that using a URL shortening service bypasses the link hijacking. I'll use that instead of redirecting people to Dreamwidth, I think.

Comments

sorry to jump in but

[wytchcroft]

this has been a real pain for me as well - i'd be interested to know if it gets any worse for people.

and, if you use gmail you might want to see this too:
http://biting-moopie.livejournal.com/14654.html

i've only just started exploring DW over LJ so i'm sorry if this appears brusque - i was actually searching for Shakespeare in the interest thing and stumbled in here.
If you know any good shakespeare comms could you let me know? thanks :))

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Experimentation shows that if I shorten affiliate links using bit.ly, the affiliate tag stays. I may do that as an easier option than asking people to click through DW and change my footer to explain why all the URLs look strange when you hover over them. (I think it may keep the linked-to companies who don't use affiliate tags from knowing that the click came from you, however, so if you want them to know that, the DW option is better.)

But I'll do that later, as it's time to leave work now. :)

[canis-ridens.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not seeing the tags replaced with (likely) LJ's. I'm still using an S1 style, though how that would play into it, I have no idea.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

Apparently LiveJournal has now removed the linkjacking code (via Hacker News).