I Turned Down the Easiest Money on the Internet

There is a version of this website that makes money by Friday.

I sign up for Amazon Associates. I put links in the gear posts. Somebody buys a flashlight, I get three percent. It takes about twenty minutes to set up and almost every site you read is already doing it.

I am not going to do it. Here is why, in plain terms.

Amazon's operating agreement lets them terminate a publisher for promoting material they consider libelous or defamatory. That determination is theirs. Sole discretion. There is no hearing, there is no appeal, and there is no requirement that anybody prove anything first.

Now put that next to what this site actually does.

I publish records about people who would strongly prefer I did not. That is the entire job. Which means the subject of a story I am working on could file a complaint, and the company holding my revenue gets to decide whether my reporting is defamatory. Not a court. Not a jury. A retailer, protecting a retailer.

Three percent of a flashlight is not worth that.

So I closed that door before I ever opened it, and I want to be straight with you about what it cost, because it was not nothing. Amazon converts better than everything else combined. Twenty-four hour cookie, but people already have accounts, already have cards on file, and buy in one click. Passing on Amazon is passing on most of the easy money on the internet.

Thirty six programs. All researched. None turned on. That has been sitting in my database doing nothing since the day I built it, because I could not answer one question honestly.

The question was not which one pays the most.

The question was which ones can never be used against me.

Here is the standard I landed on, and you can hold me to it.

One. I only link tools that actually run this site. Not a gear page of things I have never touched. If it is not in the stack that publishes what you are reading right now, it does not get a link.

Two. Nothing that can be revoked by a complaint. Software companies do not care who I write about. Retailers can be pressured. That rules out an entire category no matter what it pays.

Three. It gets disclosed every single time, in the open, not in a footer. If I earn from a link, the sentence next to it says so.

That leaves a short list. The tools I am turning on are the ones I use every day: the platform this site is built on, the email tool that owns my list instead of renting it, the publishing software, and the encrypted email and VPN I actually run. Recurring commissions, disclosed, and none of them can be leaned on by somebody who does not like a story.

I am telling you all of this before a single link goes live, on purpose.

Because the normal way this happens is you notice one day that a guy's recommendations got a lot friendlier, and you never find out what he agreed to in order to keep the check coming. I would rather show you the terms I refused up front, and then let you decide what my recommendations are worth.

There is a business lesson under this that has nothing to do with me.

Every revenue stream you build carries a set of terms, and most people never read them until the money stops. Go read the agreement behind your biggest income source right now. Find the termination clause. Ask yourself who has the power to trigger it and what it would take.

If the answer is a single complaint from somebody who does not like you, that is not a revenue stream. That is a rope somebody else is holding.

The links go live once the applications are approved. When they do, you will see the disclosure right there next to them, every time.

And you will never see an Amazon link on this site.

That one is not for sale.