Still, that is a pretty great idea, but I share your concerns about sponsorships.
The problem might not even be that you suddenly talk about a product more positively because you have an affilitation with the brand, but that you overcompensate against that effect and are suddenly more critical of the product. Either way, a neutral stance isn't guaranteed anymore, and even if it was you'd have a hard time proving it.
I mean, we aren't writing the vast majority of the content on the wiki, and if we modify anything, that's public record. We could have a policy of being hands-off of anything to do with stuff that has sponsored us in any way, but that gets tricky.
I mostly like the idea of auto-affiliate links because we avoid all of that. We have no incentive to change our opinion about products.
I think affiliate links are the way to go. Most people are going to opt for Newegg and Amazon (and if not, at least price check them) - Nothing wrong with making money off purchases through links IMO.
You wouldn't be favoring a certain type of hardware. Just a certain type of vendor.
That's the gist of it.
Would there be any benefit to using the affiliate program on a page by page item over say everybody just using a PCPartpicker-esque service privately, other than as a revenue stream for the site?
PCPartPicker is great in terms of assembling a record of a build log, but you aren't using it when researching parts themselves. Nor are you usually using it when you're only upgrading some stuff, instead of a whole new system. For folks who are at the stage of the build process where they're trying to figure out what's best for them, the Wiki would be beneficial since they get all of this dense information and details.
Having the current price with that listing, then, would be helpful since it gives them a sense of what they're getting for the real, current, market price. I'd imagine that, at that point, once they know what they want, they'd only then go about loading it into PCPartPicker or what have you, and that would be specifically for building an entire computer.
I mean, to be straight, we have no idea if people would click the links and buy things and that this would generate meaningful revenue for the site. I have no idea if people will be upset about this sort of thing even if we talk about it openly now, and have prominent disclosures so people are aware that the links are affiliate links. But of all the the monetization methods that I can come up with, this (IMO) provides the greatest benefit and utility to users, and does the least "damage" in terms of cluttering or objectivity or other such concerns. So that's why I've brought this up - mostly to see how the community feels about it.
For what it's worth, this is not a settled issue internally. We have some disagreements about whether or not this would be a good thing to do. So it's understood that there's a spectrum of opinions on this!
