LinkYield

Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.

At $49/mo (assumed category price), you need 1,701 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.

No tracked rivals with verified revenue to benchmark against.

No similar products found in the radar corpus — either genuinely novel, or too small to track.

• Skimlinks / Sovrn Commerce — Already auto-monetizes publisher outbound links at scale with a huge merchant network newcomers can't match.
• Rewardful — Evidence shows it powers 2k+ SaaS programs — the default tracking/payout layer in this space.
• Tapfiliate / Trackdesk / Affonso — Cheap, mature link-tracking and payout tooling competing on price with active launch marketing.

• No radar products, no funded companies, and zero Reddit signal for these keywords — evidence base is effectively empty.
• X chatter is mostly vendor/builder promo (mangosqueezy, Affonso, Partnerquill, CreatorHero), not buyer pull.
• Rewardful data cited in chatter: most programs have <50 affiliates, ~1% conversion, high churn — weak underlying economics for link revenue.
• Complaint signal is about payout failures (levelsio/Rewardful+Wise) and creators earning little — pain exists but points to low ARPU.

• 'Monetizing backlinks' shades into paid-link schemes Google explicitly penalizes; publishers risk deindexing and blame you.
• Cookie/ITP tracking decay and ad blockers erode attribution, the core value you'd sell.
• Revenue share on low-converting affiliate traffic (~1%) means tiny per-publisher payouts and fast churn.
• Incumbents own merchant supply; you'd start with no advertiser inventory, making the product empty on day one.

• Google Search ranking/link-spam policy — One policy update classifying your monetized links as paid links penalizes every publisher and empties the platform overnight.
• Affiliate networks (Impact, Awin, CJ, Amazon Associates) API and terms — Losing API access or being banned for sub-affiliating removes all monetizable offers instantly.
• Browser cookie/tracking policy (Safari ITP, Chrome) — Further attribution restrictions break click tracking, so conversions and revenue simply stop being recorded.

• Cannot tell whether publishers would accept SEO risk from monetized outbound links.
• No data on realistic RPM per thousand outbound clicks in your target verticals.
• Unknown whether any merchant network would grant a new entrant sub-affiliate rights.

Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-05.

Skip broad link monetization; instead serve one vertical's publishers with compliant, disclosed sponsored-placement management plus transparent payouts.

Cheapest next step: DM 15 niche publishers/newsletter owners this week asking what they currently earn from outbound links and whether they'd risk monetizing them — no build.

Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 5.0 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.

This one got a skip. Every morning the engine files one mined gap that could be a yes — idea, score, and what holds it back, free at 7am AEST. Unedited, like this verdict.

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Weekly re-scan against the live corpus. If the market moves this ShipScore by a point, or flips the verdict, you hear about it. Free while we're small.