[Adium-devl] Monetizing Adium

[Evan Schoenberg]

Quoting Chris Forsythe <chris at growl.info>:

> Eric Richie wrote:
>
>>>>> We all know about the tshirt store and selling Adium plushies and
>>>>> things like that, but do you have any oddball, hairbrained ideas
>>>>> which we could utilize so that we can start paying people to work on
>>>>> Adium full time or part time?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>
>> This would definitely come in as oddball but lets see what you guys think.
>> A lot of people use the iTunes status.  I know that you can list iTunes
>> songs on your website which people can then click on your link and buy
>> through the store with you getting a small referral payment.  Would there be
>> a way that we could take the iTunes status and turn it into a link to the
>> iTunes Store which could then provide us with that referral fee?  I'm sure
>> no one would fault us for this (although I'm sure SOMEONE will find a
>> complaint just because it's the way of the world).  It would also be far
>> less intrusive than things like ads.
>>
>>
>>
> If doable that seems like a great idea.
>

I'm open to anyone figuring out how to make this happen.  I signed up,  
for Adium, to the iTunes LinkShare network (the one that Apple goes  
through for that sort of affiliate work) a month or so ago and read  
through the documentation.  So far as I could tell, the process goes:
1. Log into LinkShare with an iTunes-associated accout
2. Create a link via the website for a song, artist, or album
3. Use this link, which does not have a clear relationship in terms of  
URL to the original text, on your website or whatever.

On the other hand, though, some sites seem to have lots of dynamically  
generated content that has iTunes affiliate links.  dailytunes.com,  
for example, links to a php script which does *something* to make the  
iTunes link... so it must be possible, unless they aren't taking a cut  
from the affiliate linkage, which I seriously doubt.

-Evan