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Silicon Follies
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My troubles began where most affiliate addictions begin, at the sign-up page for Amazon's Associate Program. There, under the headline "Open Your Own Online Store Today!" I was invited to apply to sell the bookseller's inventory through my site. You provide your mailing address and site URL, and unless you're running a porn palace, a hate group or amazonsucks.com, an approval soon arrives by e-mail, with instructions on how to set up links and banner ads. Since the day that e-mail arrived in my box, I have signed on willy-nilly to dozens of similar programs to sell everything from music to magazines to Pamela Anderson pool cues. In reality, I don't sell anything. I simply direct people with disposable income to online stores who take and fill the orders. The merchants then pay me a percentage of each sale or a small set fee for playing rainmaker.

The merchants track my earnings with codes embedded in the links or ads they provide for my site. For instance, the links to Amazon at my personal site each conclude with my account name, "thebookofzines." That tells the bookseller where you are coming from. If you purchase books, Amazon credits me with 5 percent to 15 percent of the price of each title. It costs you nothing, and Amazon is happy to pay me for the introduction. Typically, I earn about $10 a week through my Amazon links. I know this because each week the company e-mails me a report detailing which books have been sold through my site. It then tallies my commission and, every three months, sends me a check. Other sites total my commissions daily or weekly and post them on a password-protected Web page, where I can check them once a week or once an hour. And I do, compulsively. It's like watching a stock that never goes down.

Since Amazon launched the affiliate revolution in July 1996, more than 320,000 people have signed on to boost its bottom line, and their own. Amazon is tight-lipped about how much of its revenue comes through affiliates, but one estimate puts it at between 5 percent and 15 percent. The company brought in $600 million last year, so affiliate revenues could range from $30 million to $90 million annually, and (assuming a 10 percent average commission) affiliate payouts from $3 million to $9 million. I read all these figures in Evan Schwartz's book "Digital Darwinism" and later had this dream: Every person who purchased books at Amazon for an entire year came through my site. Within a few weeks, Bill Gates and I were competing to see who had a bigger house.

Next page | I could be making millions -- or at least thousands, maybe