Referral Links, Web Ethics, Etc

In my last post I discussed some of the hosting services that I’ve been examining. A few of the links (TextDrive, Joyent, Strongspace) contain referral id’s. Any click on these URL’s that lead to a sale generate a small commission for me.

I don’t expect big things from these referrals, but you never know. If I’m happy with a service and someone who reads this blog ends up choosing that service for their own use, I see a referral fee as a win-win. The obvious exception to this rule is the temptation to blindly refer services/products that you can’t/don’t vouch for just for the commission. I don’t think I would ever do this, given the poor trade-off between sacrificing what small bit of credibility that I have and the meager amount of income that I would generate. The poker links on the right follow the same mold: these are sites and/or services that I actually use.

Now, to the point of this post. Any links that I include in-text (there was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about this the other day) will be marked with a double-underline. This will differentiate sponsored links from normal links. I think the double-underline is somewhat of an industry standard, so I’m happy to go with it. Once again, this is all moot given my traffic, but the same principles will probably be used on DCKickball’s blog.