I'm not sure what Conde's plan is, but I really would love to see reddit run [1]viglinks on the site. If you're not familiar with it, viglinks uses some javascript to append an affiliate ID to any outbound links on the site (and it's completely transparent to the user).
I see people linking me to amazon all the time when I ask for book recommendations. Often, I end up buying things as a result of things I see on reddit.
(I don't work for viglinks, but I think the idea behind it is brilliant. As a user, this is the most non-intrusive way to monetize a site I've yet seen.)
For the size of reddit and the potential of the revenue stream, they would do much better signing up to the top X (where X is in the hundreds) affiliate schemes themselves and doing their own re-writing server-side (no lag introduced on the client side).
As a secondary revenue stream, reddit could then make an API available for others to do the same and charge only 15% for the service... undercutting viglink and making more revenue for themselves from other sites.
URL rewriting is easy, and signing up to affiliate schemes takes 30 seconds and is only done once per scheme... there's no reason to give away 25% of revenue for it.
I agree, I especially think that Redditors would be happy to support Reddit in a way that leaves them with the same amount of money, Amazon with less and Reddit with more.
Livejournal did this in 2010 and their regexes were pretty bad redirecting GlutenFreeBay.com to ebay.com thinking they were changing affiliate parameters. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1168331
I see people linking me to amazon all the time when I ask for book recommendations. Often, I end up buying things as a result of things I see on reddit.
(I don't work for viglinks, but I think the idea behind it is brilliant. As a user, this is the most non-intrusive way to monetize a site I've yet seen.)
[1]http://www.viglink.com/