How Do Amazon Links Support Blu-ray.com?

[DR BLU NEO]

Honestly, I'm happy that blu-ray.com benefits from my purchases. I enjoy blu-ray.com immensely. I'm at this site everyday. I save a ton on blu-ray purchases because of blu-ray.com and I'm always learning. I don't always buy from amazon though because their prices have jumped dramatically. But I do realize that the owner of blu-ray.com has put a lot of love and time into this site. I appreciate his continued efforts on his blu-ray reviews and keeping his site so user friendly. The least I can do is purchase amazon products through his links. If the owner of blu-ray becomes a billionaire, then I'm happy for him. I'm not going to get jealous or wish his business to fail. He took a big chance putting money and endured stress working on his blu-ray.com site. He should get rewarded in spades. Starting your own business is not easy.

[jw]

Originally Posted by DR BLU NEO

Honestly, I'm happy that blu-ray.com benefits from my purchases. I enjoy blu-ray.com immensely. I'm at this site everyday. I save a ton on blu-ray purchases because of blu-ray.com and I'm always learning. I don't always buy from amazon though because their prices have jumped dramatically. But I do realize that the owner of blu-ray.com has put a lot of love and time into this site. I appreciate his continued efforts on his blu-ray reviews and keeping his site so user friendly. The least I can do is purchase amazon products through his links. If the owner of blu-ray becomes a billionaire, then I'm happy for him. I'm not going to get jealous or wish his business to fail. He took a big chance putting money and endured stress working on his blu-ray.com site. He should get rewarded in spades. Starting your own business is not easy.

true, from what I have gathered the site originated in 2002 or around that period as Marwan posted the first news article. Kinda neat to read that old news and probably a period of time when Iceman and Marwan were posting stuff and not really anyone was reading it. Give it a few years and things have blossomed

[Moefiz]

I look at it this way we all come here to talk and rant about Blu-ray without be charge to do so the site as to get its funding from somewhere and if by following links to Amazon to purchase your Blu-ray movies so be it, I prefer to do this on B-r-C than another site.

Have anyone been over to Avs recently...you have links all over the place over there to buy stuff and I an sure they are also getting a % out of that.
At least over here we only have Amazon.

[Blu Titan]

Originally Posted by Mojo21

I find that sticky kind of dishonest and I really do not want to offend anyone. As a fellow affliate marketer, I know how tough it is to pull in sales because let's face it, what real reason to people have to buy from you and not Amazon, Ebay, etc.?

Blu-ray.com is sitting on a gold mine domain and if affiliate marketing is the way they want to go, that is great. But to word it like you depend on free commisions to keep this site running really bothers me.

The owners of blu-ray.com are making an exorbitant amount of money by capitalizing on amazon's awesome company and a great domain name. I can tell you without a doubt how very little of their profits are needed to run this site.

And no, amazon does not need the money either but without them there are blu-ray.com sales. Without blu-ray.com there is still an Amazon. That's my 2 cents.

Reads like a bunch of sour grapes to me.

[Blu Titan]

Originally Posted by DR BLU NEO

Honestly, I'm happy that blu-ray.com benefits from my purchases. I enjoy blu-ray.com immensely. I'm at this site everyday. I save a ton on blu-ray purchases because of blu-ray.com and I'm always learning. I don't always buy from amazon though because their prices have jumped dramatically. But I do realize that the owner of blu-ray.com has put a lot of love and time into this site. I appreciate his continued efforts on his blu-ray reviews and keeping his site so user friendly. The least I can do is purchase amazon products through his links. If the owner of blu-ray becomes a billionaire, then I'm happy for him. I'm not going to get jealous or wish his business to fail. He took a big chance putting money and endured stress working on his blu-ray.com site. He should get rewarded in spades. Starting your own business is not easy.

I concur with your post. Entrepeneurs should be rewarded for their efforts, and not envied for it. I, obviously, enjoy posting here and always link from here before making any Amazon purchases. Fair play I call it.

[Wreck]

Originally Posted by toefer

Just be glad that he's (or she's?) decided to make money as an Amazon affiliate, rather than hideous ads all over the place (be it AdSense, or any other appalling method).

Yeah, Im acutally a little surprised as to not see any adsense, so they really are doing a favor on that. Its been said before I believe that reviewers get paid, so there are other costs you guys arent thinking of, and reviewing is a job, after months of reviewing you can get burnt out, but if your getting paid you keep on going.

Originally Posted by jwbbud

1.70 is an overestimate, its roughly 4-6%
agreed, pages load here much faster than places like HDD

Actually, its a performance tier chart.

4% - first 1-6 items shipped.
6% - 7-30 items shipped.
6.5% - 31-110
7% -111-320
7.5% 321-630
8% -631-1570
8.25% 1571-3130
8.5% 3130 +

Thats for like bds and such, your CE are a strict 4% and other things garner higher percentages like endless.com and mp3 orders and crap.

This also recycles every month and starts over.

Some of you say its easy to run a site and doesnt cost much but there is always crap you gotta do to keep it ran well. This site keeps lots of news coming and reviews as well, it deserves all the money it earns and im sure it has cost lots in development over the years.

Dont hate the great, participate.

[iceman]

Originally Posted by Mojo21

I find that sticky kind of dishonest and I really do not want to offend anyone. As a fellow affliate marketer, I know how tough it is to pull in sales because let's face it, what real reason to people have to buy from you and not Amazon, Ebay, etc.?

Blu-ray.com is sitting on a gold mine domain and if affiliate marketing is the way they want to go, that is great. But to word it like you depend on free commisions to keep this site running really bothers me.

The owners of blu-ray.com are making an exorbitant amount of money by capitalizing on amazon's awesome company and a great domain name. I can tell you without a doubt how very little of their profits are needed to run this site.

And no, amazon does not need the money either but without them there are blu-ray.com sales. Without blu-ray.com there is still an Amazon. That's my 2 cents.

I'm going to reply to this, partly because we've been attacked about making money before (also from other affiliate marketers), partly because I can then point to this post and hopefully not have to write new answers about this, but mostly because it's funny since it's so VERY far from the truth. First of all, Amazon is not helping us, we are helping Amazon sell discs. We chose to help Amazon because of several reasons: 1: During the format war a lot of people were looking at Amazon to compare how well BD were doing and how well HD DVD were doing, we were trying to help those numbers by pushing BD sales. 2. Amazon is THE preferred "disc shopping" site anyway, they have a very good reputation and deliver fast etc. We felt like it was safe/good to recommend them and sell through them. If we pick a crappy retailer it will affect us negatively as well. 3: Amazon has a really nice API/WSC, which everyone can connect to and update prices etc automatically, it's not feasible to do this manually. 4. We need SOME kind of income to run the site.

Do you see any advertising in this forum? Do you see any advertising (except Amazon links) at all on our site? Personally I don't like cluttered sites, pop-ups, blink-blink-flash-flash and other intrusive advertising, this is why we don't have any advertising, only Amazon advertising that we think are relevant and that our visitors might appreciate. We don't even have this advertising when certain words gets underlined and shows some product. We have received very lucrative offers about such advertising, but we don't want to mess up the site.

Compare with those sites for example: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/, http://www.dvdaf.com/ do you see us using such links at the top of the site?

Can you name any big consumer site that has less advertising than us?

Our servers are located in New York, which we have a 1 gig-e dedicated connection to and we also use a distribution/cache-network with servers around the world, so screenshots in places like Asia and Australia for example still loads very fast. I suggest you do a check on what such a solution costs per month in New York. If your are too lazy to do that, I can tell you that it's not cheap. We also have off-site backups to other servers and locations and cutting edge web servers aren't exactly free either. We take pride in that the site, forums and images loads very fast and that we are able to provide people with this service which I think they appreciate. This is also something I personally appreciate; we are simply trying to build the site like we want a site ourselves.

I'm also happy to say that I'm pretty sure we give our reviewers the highest compensation of all review sites. I think they do an excellent job and that they should be rewarded for it. We also have pretty advanced/long reviews compared to other sites, which is also the way we want it. We like quality and we don't cheap out, that's why we are blue and not red

When asked in the forum how we benefit from Amazon, I answered the question and since this has happend on at least a couple of occasions, I sticked the thread. Very few visitors on the site check the Feedback forum and when I now look at the thread I see that 920 persons has checked that thread. We could as well "beg" at the top of the site or forum and loads of people would see it, but we don't want to do that, which is why we kind of hid it in this part of the forum. And I can also assure you that we don't even make a fraction of what you seem to think and yes, of course we are very dependant on our Amazon income, we don't have any other income! We could do just fine with other advertising, but we feel that this is the best solution for both us and our visitors right now.

Beside all of this, neither I or Marwin has taken out any salary in 2008, it all goes back to the site. The site was originally a 2-man operation, but has grown a lot through the years. BD grows and so must we. It's impossible for me and Marwin to do everything so a lot of people are now helping out with the site -which costs money- and are doing a really good job and turning the site into something great

Among a lot of other improvements, we recently upgraded Deci to maintain the site, which has really offloaded work from me, so I can continue to develop the site. That has lead to that we are now maintaining movie-lists from UK, Canada and South Korea. You might also have noticed reviews popping up from all sorts of countries. We also plan to let members choose which site they want to shop from, by using a setting. So if they don't like Amazon, they can use eBay (who also has an API/WSC) or whatever, or simply compare which site is cheapest etc. We also have other really nice stuff on the way, but I can't talk about that

We have worked on the site daily for 6 years, if we haven't directly worked on something, we have thought about plans and what to do next and after that etc. What I'm trying to say with all this, is that if we would have done all this just for the money, which I feel that we are being attacked for for some reason -which is funny btw, since you are breaking the forum rules by advertising your own site on our site and 100% of your posts has been in the Hot Deals forum- everything would have been very different and we wouldn't be where we are today. I'm also not after fame or enjoy being a public person etc, which is also why we always send people from the staff to different events -which costs money- and shows etc. I like to program, I like to develop and create stuff, I like computers and technology, I like games and strategy, and of course I like movies (which is how we got into this situation in the first place), so I just really really like my job and am very grateful for having such a job.

We are still very far from where we want the site to be eventually (it will be a beauty when we are done ), but I think we've come quite far anyway. We have done some -to what we know- innovative solutions that we haven't seen before, but that we have now already seen copied on other sites, so we must have done something right

[jw]

You know its pretty bad when you have to defend yourself for trying to run a business and make something that is free to use better. Well said Iceman!! You guys do a great job running the site and providing a ad free environment. I had said before I have been on forums where you lose the forum to advertising, heres a great example . There is no need for all them ads on a site like such.

What I'm trying to say with all this, is that if we would have done all this just for the money, which I feel that we are being attacked for for some reason -which is funny btw, since you are breaking the forum rules by advertising your own site on our site and 100% of your posts has been in the Hot Deals forum- everything would have been very different and we wouldn't be where we are today.

I have noticed an influx of this lately, I guess with the high traffic generated by the domain name you will always be a target. There's a guy doing Amazon price adjustments only to promote his own site and the other blu-ray related news sites coming here and posting stuff as "NEWS" only because they got the news flash prior to Josh posting it. I find that annoying and very unnecessary, but I am not here to argue that.
Amazon is a great company and whenever I can I buy and create links to buy through here.I very seldom buy blu-rays through there but I do buy alot of other high dollar products through those links, thats why I create them. That 50.00 Mario Kart or 250.00 Wii helps out alot and someone might as well get credit for the sale
Thanks for making this site my number one source for information and continie making it better as I will continue supporting it whenver I can.

[JimShaw]

Since I am new to Blu-ray.com, I need a little info.

I am starting to purchase Blu-rays by loging on to Tower, Amazon, etc.

My question is: Does Blu-ray.com get some credit, $$$, etc. if I were to link from this web site to the retailers? Or does it matter?

If my linking from Blu-ray.com helps support this site, please let me know. I want to help keep us going.

[quirkmanly]

Here's the sticky on that subject (it's in the feedback forum):

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=39424

Cheers

[groovyone]

It does with Amazon. When I order movies from Amazon I go to them using links from the Movies section of this site.

[JimShaw]

I thank you for the info. From this point on I will link from this site to Amazon to purchase.

[JimShaw]

Originally Posted by quirkmanly

Here's the sticky on that subject (it's in the feedback forum):

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=39424

Cheers

Thanks for the link. I am terrible about finding links on this site.

The link explained it well.

[Rob71]

Before reading through this thread I thought only Blu-ray purchases were credited. But since I found out anything purchased counts, and I do a good 75% of my shopping at Amazon I go through this site for everything now. Figure it's the least I can do for all my off topic posts and smart-a$$ comments.

[LBJMVP23]

Great info! TY

[Damage Inc.]

Well anyway, I sure hope this website doesn't take huge advantage of the brand and Amazon.
I mean, in a way it's just really easy money and all that you know.

Otherwise, I would of course like to support this website "for free".
As in, I click a link here and buy a product there and Amazon rewards Blu-ray.com for it.
Great.

However, doesn't it always lead to Amazon.COM?
Which wouldn't work for me here in The Netherlands buying from Amazon.CO.UK.
And I'm not buying from the US, even if I'd want to, because shipping-costs are too high.
MAYBE some time I'll put in a big order to compensate for the costs.
But there is currently not enough I necessarily need to buy there.
So, sorry that I can apparently not support...

[jw]

well search the uk titles (click on this flag and it will search on UK titles)
No one said you were restricted to the

All the Amazon's have a tag

[degarcia09]

Originally Posted by Iceman

Compare with those sites for example: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/, http://www.dvdaf.com/ do you see us using such links at the top of the site?

In the words of Dave Chappelle "That shit is Gross!!!!!"

[Lweel8]

I am on blu-ray.com every day, without fail. I would love to support the site but when I click on the Buy Now link it takes me to Amazon.com. I would love it if the site knew, via my profile settings, to take me to the same product at Amazon.ca. As it is, I don't think blu-ray.com gets credit for the stuff I buy when I change the URL to Amazon.ca and re-search for the same item.

Any chance of that happening?

Jacob

[Lweel8]

Ah, nevermind. I just clicked on the flag at the top right and it changed the store country. I wonder why my country isn't stored in "my settings?" Now my only complaint is that the country setting doesn't seem to save. When I launched a new browser it still remembered Canada but was showing all of the American lists. I had to click on the Canadian flag again to switch them.