Deutsche Version dieses Beitrags

Five years ago I created an Amazon.de affiliate account for OSM. I was unable to make other people do this so I had to do it myself. :)

I had not made any calculations beforehand and thus no clue what to expect. So I cannot say I am surprised but nevertheless I was quite pleased by the amount of money coming in. I want to thank everybody who used and spread this possibility to generate some money in the name of OSM. In these five years they:

• bought nearly 7000 products on Amazon.de
• thus creating nearly 200.000 EUR sales figures for Amazon.de and so
• generated nearly 10.000 EUR affiliate fee for OSM.

Even when people criticize Amazon I want to repeat my earlier statement that if you want to buy or even live completely correct regarding politics and environment you had to go back to your own farm. Just think of BSE, the various meat scandals, the cease-and-desist-orders of Wolfskin against bloggers, the logging of the rain forest for palm oil and McDonalds meat and the exhaust fume fraud of several car producers: nearly every consumer makes compromises while shopping (consciuosly or unconsciously). So I hope that environmentally aware persons won’t criticise people shoping at Amazon and vice versa.

My self-chosen task of managing the affiliate account I recently handed over to Frederik Ramm, the treasurer of the FOSSGIS e.V. Because of this I don’t have exact numbers of the last months but interpolated them from the months if the last years.

It is a pity that the mapper colleagues on the other site of the great pond don’t make use of the account I created on amazon.com. I lack the needed American bank account to do so myself.