django-linkshare

One of the ways to make money on the itunes store is to sign up for the itunes affiliate program. Linkshare runs the program in the USA and they will give you a 5% commission on all sales that you refer. It works through cookie based tracking that is valid for 72 hours… Meaning that if you follow one of my links (even to a free download) and then buy something 2 days later then I get credited for the referral and make a few cents.

Linkshare links currently make up about 15% of the revenue in my app business. It’s an extra little bit of money that takes very little effort to add to the bottom line.

I’m building up my back end platform for reporting on all the various numbers I get for the business and putting them in one place. This past friday I got an email about the new web services REST api for Linkshare which I can use to generate various reports. It took just a couple hours to put together a django app that can download the month to date numbers and store them in the database for reporting.

There might be a handful of people out there interested in using this sort of thing so I put the code up on github.