>>I'd be curious to know what they'll do with links that already have affiliate links in them.
In theory they won't be overwriting other affiliate links. Only direct links to the merchant.
>>From the merchant's perspective? Well, you could argue that the traffic it is justified because Reddit provides the medium for the conversations/clicks -- it is not exactly stealing.
The traffic is totally justified and it isn't stealing or unethical in any way but there is no value for a merchant to pay for traffic they were already getting. The links are already there, people would be posting the links anyway so without them doing anything proactive to drive traffic to those links or promote them (that would really, really p##s off their readers so I doubt they will go down that road) they aren't adding anything on our end. If they wanted to work out a deal with us directly and not go through Viglink that might be a conversation we would have but Viglink makes it very, very easy to implement.