Reddit may have hit upon a way to earn money without their users ever knowing – and that’s a good thing

Whether you love or hate Reddit, it’s hard to ignore that the site isn’t one of the best places to find interesting content from around the Web.

As a growing company, it obviously needs money to stay afloat, and its sparse ads and Gold user subscription plans contribute to that to an extent. But it will have to do more to stay viable in the coming years.

To that end, it’s begun experimenting with a new way to generate revenue that you won’t even notice until you look for it: affiliate links.

The company said that it’s now testing a system that will rewrite inks to ecommerce sites in users’ posts with an affiliate URL that credits Reddit.

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That means that if your Reddit post contains a link to a product, Reddit will replace that link with one that identifies Reddit as the source, so the company receives a small percentage of the purchase through that URL.

Reddit explained that it’s implementing Viglinks’ affiliate marketing system to make this happen, so that they can tap into a network of more than 5,000 merchants instantly.

It noted that this won’t interfere with existing links, so if you’ve already added your own affiliate link to make money from your posts, you don’t have to worry about Reddit profiting off your custom URL. Plus, both viewers and posters in the test group can opt out of the program.

Reddit said it will monitor performance and uptime for issues with Viglinks’ service on the site. It also mentioned that its contract with the company disallows Viglinks from storing user data or cookies during this process.

It’s good to know that Reddit is looking into ways of increasing revenue without compromising on the user experience on its site. It’s also likely that this system will work with third-party Reddit apps, which means that the developers behind them won’t have to modify their software. All that equates to more uninterrupted GIFs and dank memes – hopefully, for a long while to come.