![\"viglink](\"http:\/\/www.stoth.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/f92fc_viglink-logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>Affiliate programs, where a website can link to a commerce website like Amazon and eBay and receive a commission on resulting sales, are potentially a big source of money for publishers. But they can also be pain to set up, meaning that many publishers who might benefit from affiliate links don’t use them, and that those links aren’t even encoded correctly more than half the time — at least according to\u00a0VigLink<\/a>, a startup hoping to change that.<\/p>\nThe San Francisco company wants to automate the process of creating those links. It’s making its own deals with many of those affiliate programs, then it offers publishers a service where they just add a few lines of JavaScript to their site, then all possible affiliate links are automatically transformed into actual affiliate links. For example, right now, if VentureBeat linked to a book listed on Amazon, that could automatically become a link where we get a commission every time a reader clicks through and buys the book.<\/p>\n
VigLink just announced $800,000 in seed funding raised from First Round Capital and Google Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, former Google executive and current LinkedIn Vice President of Product Dipchand Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler.<\/p>\n
Co-founder and chief executive\u00a0Oliver Roup<\/a> acknowledged that VigLink isn’t the first company to offer something like this. It’s competing with a London startup called SkimLink, but Roup argued that there are some key differences, such as VigLink’s Silicon Valley location and connections, plus the fact that publishers don’t suffer of VigLink’s infrastructure suffers from the occasional startup hiccups — if the company’s servers go down, its links still work.<\/p>\n Roup compares the service to Google AdSense, in that it can be a good fit for both large and small websites. For now, VigLink is in private testing, but interested publishers can also go to the site and get an estimate for how much money they might make from affiliate programs. For kicks, I entered VentureBeat.com , and, it turns we aren’t talking about a huge boost to our income — this month’s estimated VigLink revenue would have just about paid for my recent trip to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. But hey, if the service is as hassle-free as Roup says, why wouldn’t we install it and make that extra cash?<\/p>\n “We monetize the ordinary hyperlink,” Roup said. “By buying and selling small items that didn’t seem to be worth a lot initially, we could create a really link economy here.”<\/p>\n