You make excellent points. Our existing users signed up to make money, so for them (remember this was an email to our registered user base) paid posts is probably the most valuable thing we can offer. Going forward we probably won't focus on that much as we build our core base of writers, and we are going to have a high editorial bar for paid writers that many of our affiliate contributors - quite honestly - are not going to be able to meet.

I had a life before Referly, a life devoid of affiliate stuff where I was an editor in Chief of a local tech community site [1] - and I'm super excited to be digging up those old skills.

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2010/01/se...