I think you should remove the direct affiliate links from your post and link to your website. As I understand it, to prevent spammers you are only allowed to put links on sites which you directly own, not third party sites.
More transparency about how the money travels from amazon → charity is needed, and more transparency about when/if the program stops (so people know they are not going to start benefiting your pocket in 6 months time!)
Google chrome extensions exist which automatically insert an affiliate link into a page (I don’t know if these are a violation of the agreement) but they might be more convenient for users if they are.
Thanks for these helpful comments. Taking them in turn:
I’d added effective-altruism.com as one of the domains which could send links, and it got accepted (though people going via the main ‘Shop for charity’ page on my website as you suggest is not a bad idea.) I think including the links in this post will increase the chance that people’ll actually bookmark them, and Amazon do seem to let bookmarks work (e.g. those from the sidebar of http://slatestarcodex.com/ ).
Yes, people can indeed rest assured that this money’ll never benefit me :) Hopefully the edit I made in response to Ryan and Topher’s suggestion makes the process transparent: “The 5% comes from Amazon’s ‘affiliate’ scheme, and goes to affiliate accounts which I’ve set up for this project, the money from which I’ll always direct only to GiveWell-recommended charities. ”
Good idea, but some comments:
I think you should remove the direct affiliate links from your post and link to your website. As I understand it, to prevent spammers you are only allowed to put links on sites which you directly own, not third party sites.
More transparency about how the money travels from amazon → charity is needed, and more transparency about when/if the program stops (so people know they are not going to start benefiting your pocket in 6 months time!)
Google chrome extensions exist which automatically insert an affiliate link into a page (I don’t know if these are a violation of the agreement) but they might be more convenient for users if they are.
Thanks for these helpful comments. Taking them in turn:
I’d added effective-altruism.com as one of the domains which could send links, and it got accepted (though people going via the main ‘Shop for charity’ page on my website as you suggest is not a bad idea.) I think including the links in this post will increase the chance that people’ll actually bookmark them, and Amazon do seem to let bookmarks work (e.g. those from the sidebar of http://slatestarcodex.com/ ).
Yes, people can indeed rest assured that this money’ll never benefit me :) Hopefully the edit I made in response to Ryan and Topher’s suggestion makes the process transparent: “The 5% comes from Amazon’s ‘affiliate’ scheme, and goes to affiliate accounts which I’ve set up for this project, the money from which I’ll always direct only to GiveWell-recommended charities. ”
This extension appears to be http://bit.ly/1ruTdZA