About Associate Programs

There are many ways to spend money on Web sites and not many ways to make money from Web sites. One way to generate revenue from a Web site is through associate programs. When you join an associate program, the site you link to gives you a tiny amount of money whenever a user clicks through or clicks through and makes a purchase. For example, if you reach Amazon.com from my Book Reviews pages and buy a book, I get a few percent of the sale. I like associate programs for a couple of reasons:

They’re a good idea: Banner ads are just plain obnoxious and they don’t work. Micro-payments based on directing someone to a product or service can work. It is important that viable economic models are found. Hopefully, the economic models to come will leave the Internet as a medium that still allows nearly anyone in a wealthy country to publish. Jakob Nielsen's column The Web in 2001: Paying Customers addresses the question "How can you have an economy without money?" Hint: you can't.
They add extra value: The Web is called the Web for a reason: namely, the interconnectedness of sites. I really like linking to other sites. If you look at the sites I link to, you will find that they almost all participate in associate programs too.
They provide extra information: After posting a book recommendation to a mailing list, I can check my server logs, and Amazon reports to see how much traffic was generated. I don't know that this does me any real good, but I find it interesting. If you have a commercial site, learning how people leaving your site behave on another site is quite valuable.
They’re fun!: I enjoy the few dollars I make off the associate programs more than any other money I make. It feels like finding money on the street. The first quarter I was associated with Amazon, I made something like $17.26. (This is a fraction of what it costs me to maintain this site, even if you count my time at $0/hour.) That was the most exciting money I made all year ;-)