Happy Affiliate Marketing Day to All Who Celebrate
It’s the most important commerce day of the year, and Black Friday (and this whole time period) is very important for a very specific type of internet content, which is: affiliate sales. As the ad market collapsed, various media companies, from Wirecutter to New York mag to Gawker and its various later iterations have figured out how to make a meaningful amount of money using affiliate links, which go to Amazon or other retailers and give a small percentage based on how many sales they drive.
I am not constitutionally opposed to the concept of affiliate links and marketing as a means of making money on the internet, I guess, but there is no doubt that this business model has had a big hand in reshaping and ultimately kind of fucking up the internet. At the beginning of the year, I covered a German study about Google actually getting worse in a verifiable way over time. The entire underlying thesis of this study was that Google search results have been largely taken over not just by ads, but by content that is highly monetized with affiliate marketing and has been SEOed to hell to appear high on Google’s search results.
The study found that "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality [...] we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do."
This study came out during a period of time where Google was making some very big algorithm changes that had the effect of boosting legacy domains with long histories and down-ranking smaller websites (and, notably, happened before it fucked up search even further with generative AI results).
This in turn killed or severely harmed a few smaller websites that rely on affiliate marketing to survive but had also dedicated themselves to doing highly researched reviews. The most notable of these is HouseFresh, a website that does high-quality reviews of air purifiers, and wrote two incredibly interesting articles about how Google’s algorithm changes as well as the fact that legacy websites have been taking advantage of these changes have severely hurt their business. HouseFresh explained, for example, that Rolling Stone and Forbes had gotten into the air purifier “review”/affiliate link game (alongside hundreds of other websites).
HouseFresh’s Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton wrote that the site had “virtually disappeared from Google Search results” because tons of very similar reviews and product lists had been published by sites owned by media conglomerate Dotdash Meredith on sites like money.com, Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, The Spruce Eats, etc. Many (but not all) of the sites that ranked higher than HouseFresh had not actually tested any air purifiers at all, but had figured out the SEO cheat code terminology/page design/page authority required to get their versions of their articles ranked higher than HouseFresh’s articles. When we say that we want to do journalism and write articles intended to be read by humans, not algorithms, this is what we mean.
What happened to HouseFresh occurred because the business models of legacy media companies have collapsed and making money by linking to Amazon and other retailers is one of the few bright spots on many media companies’ balance sheets. I mentioned above that I don’t fundamentally have a problem with the idea of an affiliate link, which is something I say because I sometimes need to buy an air purifier or a mattress or a computer and find myself reading reviews and deal websites to make a calculation about which one to buy.
There are websites that do earnest, good product reviews and product writing and I am glad that they are able to make money doing this work. Across the internet, websites that do hard-hitting journalism have spun up affiliate marketing editorial teams whose main job is to write lists of products or deals so that their parent corporations can make money from the outbound traffic.
I read and enjoy a lot of this content and I do not believe that I’m above it in any way; when we were launching 404 Media, we discussed having a semi-regular column called “Good Enough” in which we would recommend products that we actually use and buy, and discuss the problems we’ve solved with them, monetized with affiliate links. I don’t find the idea abhorrent and I like the two that we’ve written; the reason we haven’t published more of them is mostly because we haven’t had time.
But like anything else on the internet, good writing about products lives among 84398439 competitors who may or may not give a shit about the quality of their reviews or lists and are just trying to shove SEO keywords into their legacy domain until they rank high enough to make some money. When taken in aggregate across the entire internet, this type of behavior has had the effect of polluting the internet and making it a big time mess to search for or do anything, which is compounded by the fact that Google loads its search results with ads, AI content, its own shopping content, and other junk.
This type of affiliate content also creates a symbiotic relationship between many publications that do sincere, hard-hitting reporting on Amazon and its myriad labor and environmental abuses and Amazon, the company perpetrating those abuses. Amazon is not the only website offering affiliate deals, but it is the biggest. Websites that do great reporting on consumerism and right to repair also often end up making a few bucks by pushing new gadgets. Again, this is a “yet you participate in society”-ass argument. I buy stuff all the time and my ideals and my actions are not always in perfect alignment.
I’m writing this now because today is the Super Bowl of Affiliate Marketing. It is Black Friday, a day and weekend with many deals and many internet purchases. While many internet journalists, including us, will be more-or-less “taking it easy” over the holiday weekend, people who work on affiliate sites will be spamming posts and doing live blogs filled with affiliate links because it’s a particularly important day to share blogs about sales and deals. It is so important, in fact, that in 2021, unionized members of Wirecutter walked out between Black Friday and Cyber Monday to bargain for a better contract because they knew it would be the most impactful time of year to take a labor action.
When we were at Motherboard, we never really did affiliate content outside of a very small experiment in the last few years, spurred by an executive who said to my face that he believed we could make “$100 million a year” doing affiliate links then proceeded to give me a budget of $3,000 total to prove his theory. We published three good articles then gave up.
One of the best stunts we ever did at Motherboard was “The 10 Best Black Friday Deals at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon,” published on Black Friday of 2015, which was an article in which I spammed SEO keywords into the first two paragraphs and then published the full text of The Communist Manifesto interspersed with nonaffiliated links to buy Xboxes and laptops. The article went pretty viral and was fun to do. Sam followed this up a few years later with “The Motherboard Guide to Amazon Prime Day’s Best Deals,” which was just a list of links to articles we did about Amazon’s labor abuses.
Anyways, it is Black Friday, or International Affiliate Marketing Day. May we all celebrate.
