Clicking For Dollars

A couple weeks back, I mentioned to one of my co-workers that he should check out the special features on the “Wag the Dog” DVD. About five minutes later, he passed by my cube and mentioned that he had looked at the information on my blog and added the film to his Netflix queue. The importance of this moment didn’t strike me until Apple’s more recent announcement of an affiliate program for the iTunes Music Store.

It occurred to me that my friend had been forced to go through a circuitous route to add the movie to his Netflix queue. Rather than simply clicking a link within the review on my web page, he had to log into his Netflix account, find the movie and then add it to his queue of movies. What a pain.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Amazon Affiliates program – it seems almost obvious that Netflix should incorporate a similar affiliation system to allow web sites to provide users with an easy way to use the Netflix system. Such a system would enable Netflix to embed itself into the web – and all it would cost is a little web plumbing and whatever credit they give to referring web sites. Netflix gets a way to leverage the blogosphere, the blogosphere gets a way to further build useful content and value for its readership, and the bloggers get a way to get mildly compensated for their effort to create value.

But the prospect of multiple affiliation systems raises an interesting user interface obstacle (oh, where art thou OK/Cancel?): what happens when affiliation systems collide?

Picture the scenario: a user comes to your web site to read your review of a kick-ass new independent film about an underground band you’re interested in checking out. Does the link to the movie go to Amazon (and hence, contains your Amazon Associates ID) to allow the user to buy the DVD, or does it go to Netflix to allow the user to add the film to their Netflix queue? Does the link to the album go to Amazon to allow the user to buy the CD, or does it go to iTunes to allow the user to buy individual tracks in a digital form? What if they prefer to buy digital music from Real? Or movies from Barnes and Noble?

Although Amazon is the only real player with enough momentum to draw significant link-love from the bloggers, they can’t be all things to all people. Inevitably, as demonstrated by Apple’s affiliate program announcement, there will be new entrants, each striving to carve out their particular niche by leveraging blogs to enable customers to be “self-selected”, for lack of a better word. But it’ll have to get easier – blogging tools fail abysmally to simplify the process of leveraging other web services, like Google’s Adsense (assuming they don’t smack you down in the process). Making it easier will require a standard mechanism to interface with affiliation systems. Hmm, makes me wonder – would Marc Canter consider affiliation relationships another form of micro-content?