Glee updates: Affiliate Making Money

It doesn't seem possible that there'd be money to be made from lending e-books. But at least one woman figured out how to do it, and more little lending conglomerates seem to be on the way.

When on Dec. 30, Kindle decided to allow its customers to lend copies of purchased e-books (but only for 14 days, and only to one person), a 40-year-old Canadian woman named Catherine MacDonald had an idea that literally popped up in her dreams. She started the Kindle Lending Club. It started out as a Facebook site, where she'd match up people who wanted to lend a book to people who wanted to borrow. It quickly grew out of hand, so she looked for angel seed money.

Finding someone who was willing to invest $12,500, she launched a slick Web site and created a place where people can come and look for specific e-books, or offer to lend them. So far, she has lent more than 1,000 e-books among total strangers and it's all worked without a hitch.

But where does the money come in? If the lender finishes the book within the 14-day limit, no fees are assessed and everything is free. But if the borrowers discover that they can't finish within Amazon's 14-day lending window (and things do come up in life--someone gets sick, or a business trip comes up) lendees can offer a link to buy the e-book and lenders share a portion of the resulting revenue through Amazon's Affiliate Program. For anyone familiar with Amazon's affiliate program, it takes a lot to actually make any money, but if the business person is dogged about going about it, he or she can make some bucks out of the program. So the lendee gets an e-book at a good price, and everyone's happy.

However MacDonald in Canada is hardly the first person to come up with the idea of the Kindle Lending Club. She was merely one of the first. Now there are many on the Web and not just for Kindles either. There are nook lending clubs popping up too. Kindles and nooks don't mix, thanks to incompatible software.

Continued on the next page

The topic free iPhone is spreading wildly on Twitter right now, thanks to a massive spam campaign. A whole raft of shortened links from a whole range of link-shortening services are used in the bogus tweets - these redirect to a variety of shonky money-making sites.

This sort of activity often flies under the banner of "affiliate marketing". Sadly, this is sometimes a euphemism for a site which aims to make money out of other people by unholy means.

A better banner for this sort of site might be: "A web page with links alluding to offers from major brand names, which in turn lead you to survey sites or online product pitches unrelated to those major brands, from which the owner of the original link earns commission." The major brands earn nothing. Indeed, they aren't involved at all, other than to "lend" their name unknowingly to the exercise.

In this latest Twitter storm, many of the accounts seem to have been set up just for the purpose of short-term spamming. This sort of account is often very obvious: it was set up recently, has no followers and no-one following it, and has never posted enything personal, or even moderately human-like. Such accounts easily fail the Turing test.

Other accounts involved in this spam campaign appear to be genuine accounts, typically little used - perhaps set up in a fit of enthusiasm for Twitter, only to be abandoned by the sort of user who never quite reaches the level of self-importance to keep up the effort of sending 140-character sound-bites about the trivia of his life. These accounts are more believable, because they have at least a small amount of history, a few followers, and some personal-sounding posts.

What can we learn from this? And if we're sysadmins - or even just concerned friends and family - with a sense of responsibility for others, what advice can we give?

Here are some suggestions:

* Imagine a wise old owl on your shoulder, asking you questions. HAVE YOU EVER MET ANYONE WHO WON A FREE IPHONE OR IPAD ONLINE? HAVE YOU EVER EVEN HEARD A BELIEVABLE STORY OF SOMEONE WHO DID? DID YOU EVER GET THAT MONEY FROM THE GHANAIAN PRINCELING? (I thought not.)

* Remember the phrase "bait-and-switch". If you see a link which promises you a free iPhone (the bait), the details and conditions explaining exactly how you win, and what chance you have of winning, should appear clearly, believably and honestly as soon as you click the link. If they do not, it's a trick (the switch).

* If you have old accounts for services you no longer find interesting, or don't use much any more, don't just abandon them. Close them down. Genuine accounts to which you don't pay much attention are valuable commodities on the cybercriminal underground. They have credibility which freshly-created accounts do not, and you probably won't notice they been taken over.

* Watch the video made by Naked Security's irrepressible Graham Cluley on how to choose a strong password.

(Enjoy this video? You can check out more on the SophosLabs YouTube channel and subscribe if you like.)

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Glee updates

Thursday 17 February 2011

Affiliate Making Money

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