Is the revenue made by the Amazon Affiliate link rewriting enough to offset the costs of maintaining it?

Question

As most of us active here know, all Amazon links that are posted here (at least for U.S. amazon.com, not for Amazon in other countries, e.g. amazon.co.uk, amazon.in, etc.) are rewritten to go through rads.stackoverflow.com, which adds in Stack Exchange's affiliate referral code so that SE earns a cut of sales in case the user clicking the link goes on to purchase the item.

Unfortunately, there were and are quite a few bugs with it, which of course require resources to track down and fix. For instance, initially, links to the above internationalized Amazon sites were also being rewritten, and in turn redirecting to the U.S. site, occasionally resulting in 404 errors since ASINs aren't global; HTTPS links weren't being converted; and more recently, links to promotions (and not specific items) are currently being rewritten when they shouldn't be, breaking those links.

How much money does SE make through this affiliate program, and is it enough to offset the resources needed to resolve the current and past bugs with it?

Maybe, if the program isn't making SE that much money, it may not be worth spending the resources to keep it intact, and perhaps it might be worth just terminating the program?

Answer 1

Update as of October 4th, 2019:

To follow up on this, Amazon link rewriting has been disabled across the entire network. – Nick Larsen

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Original answer (November 2018):

I can't speak to the actual numbers today because I don't know them anymore, but it certainly was a non-trivial amount. About 3 or 4 years ago when we were tossing around ideas for new content types, it was enough that I invested time in speccing out a library feature for the site as a content type with an expected immediate turnaround. You should read "enough" as "paid for far more than my salary each month". If it's still on that same order of "enough" I'd guess we'll fix the problems soon. It's a nice stream of revenue that, with the exception of bugs, is fairly non-intrusive to goals the site.