We've been testing it out as a potential second unobtrusive revenue stream on a trial basis for a few days now (thanks for being oblivious to all my mentions of it, TDM!). The way it works is that outbound hyperlinks are checked to see if they match a list of merchants, like Amazon, and if they are then that's tracked and NeoGAF gets a percentage if you buy something after you go there. It doesn't have any sort of negative hit for you, just supports the site transparently if you leave it enabled. It doesn't add any new hyperlinks like some of those services can do, and it's not like typical affiliate linking where people are spamming links with any sort of agenda and you can't necessarily trust their motives; the links are just the links created by the users as they discuss things.
Keep in mind that banner ads on NeoGAF have absolutely dismal performance since no one clicks on them and tons of people use adblock, and that's all we've got, normally. And that's declining despite the site getting much larger. We don't have subscriptions or membership payments, no donations, no reskins. And that's intentional due to my philosophies with running the site, but it's kind of dangerous to only have one crappy source that fluctuates heavily seasonally or based on what company is willing to work with you.
NeoGAF gets rejected by almost every high quality ad network due to a) being a forum, and b) having too much "adult content," since my policies are not as strict as they could be, but that's my preference. Still, I have high standards for what sorts of advertising can show up, which means that there are barely any ad networks that we can use. In January I had to kill a major contract we had with a gaming ad network due to popups and redirects coming up <1% of the time that couldn't be addressed fast enough by their campaign management. It's important to me that the ads stay high quality and totally non-malicious, but that meant a tremendous hit to us by giving it up.
I can understand this viglink stuff being bothersome to an extremely small subset of users, potentially, if you're on a really slow computer or slow internet connection or old browser or something and you notice the redirect so it's not seamless. That's cool. Check out the
privacy policy page, which has a link to viglink and an explanation of what it does; there's an opt-out link there that should disable it on your computer, or you can noscript or adblock if you must, just like you can always do if you actively don't want to support the 100% free website that you're using.
The philosophy is to keep NeoGAF completely free to use and with unobtrusive monetization. By keeping this functionality on, >99% of you will have absolutely no impact to your experience with the site -- I do not notice it in action whatsoever and this thread with some people wondering took days to even come up -- and it potentially could do well and keep NeoGAF safe financially as it continues to grow more and more ridiculously large and we look to add better hardware, more features (I have a Who Quoted Me custom implementation coming, but that has substantial server overhead...), etc.
