Nice idea.

Tip: I'd stay away from calling it a shortener. That market is very saturated and a lot of people will leave right away.

Play on the fact that your users can get commissions for millions of products across hundreds of merchants without even signing up.

"Just give us your email and we'll let you know when you made a sale."

Bonus idea: credit your users with a few small sales in the first few days. Funny, sexy or weird things that will get them talking about your service. They'll feel like it's working and you don't have to payout until they reach $10 or so anyway -- at which point your skim should have it covered. :)

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! Interesting idea about not calling it a shortener. I'll have a think about possible alternatives :)

Clickable: http://shrtn.co

What is the value proposition? If I had an affiliate link, couldn't I share the link through any shortenter? It looks like you make it easier for people who don't have their own affiliate links to share, right?

Do you think there is a spot in the market of people who don't have enough traffic to justify their own affiliate programs, but who do have enough to generate affiliate sales?

It is an interesting space you're entering, which has lots of room for growth and innovation. Good luck!

In my eyes the value proposition is that people can replace their usual URL shortener with shrtn, and potentially earn money without having to sign up to multiple affiliate schemes etc.

Ok, so you provide convenience. This only works for people who don't already have an affiliate link though. If I am BigTimeBlogger and I want to share things that could earn me some money, it would probably make sense for me to create an affiliate account for the products I recommend, just so I can earn more (you take a cut of the commissions, right?). On the flip side, if I'm JoeNobody sharing a link to the camera I bought, it's very unlikely that I will create any sales with my 25 twitter followers.

If the market of people who are bigger than JoeNobody but smaller than BigTimeBlogger is big enough, then this is a service that will likely fill the market and do very well.

With sufficiently large scale you can negotiate better rates with affiliate programs to the point where you can return similar amounts to marketers as they'd earn signing up to the programs directly - at least that's what Skimlinks claim to offer in their advertising pitch.

Services that automatically generated shortners for user-submitted links (e.g. twitter clients and discussion forums) are also logical targets for such a service.

Sure - It isn't aimed at professional affiliate marketers for sure, but even JoeNobody might get a sale every now and again, so it still could attract that user base.

I doubt I'd ever earn enough to be worth cutting a check to, but if we could pick from a (short) list of charities, there might be enough to be worthwhile.

useful links, do I need to sign up to amazon or anything?

Nope - don't need to sign up to anything except shrtn itself. Whenever a sale is made via your link then your account will be credited with the appropriate commission.