Have you ever tried to make money on affilate links? In all honesty we make next to nothing from affiliating Amazon links. It's not even close to a viable business, we only do it because we don't like leaving money on the table.
I make about £3k per month off a site that I set up for my own amusement and time-wasting. 6 million page views per month, I'm only signed up to 4 affiliate schemes. Amazon pay the worst of all of them, that's true.
It's a side project, but for something that I only do out of love £3k per month is quite tidy.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that you could take skimlinks and knock them for six, and people would have a real benefit and reason to use embedly whereas skimlinks milk far too much and it's not even got a user benefit.
PS: Are you hiring remote workers? I know how to make this work ;)
We might be up for a commission based remote worker. :)
Hit me on email and I'll tell you more detail: david @ buro9.com
There are a couple of specifics to get right, mostly it's about giving a reason for webmasters to use it and what is massively under-estimated is that a lot of webmasters hang out places just like this and are asking for solutions to both embedding stuff and earning money.