Re:The war to sell you a mattress
by madcaptenor on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:20PM
(#15493331)
And they certainly won't tell you "don't buy any of these things". I recently came across BabyGearLab (http://babygearlab.com), which has nice reviews of, say, different car seats or different strollers, and will tell you which one is the best if money is no object, which one is the best if you're on a limited budget, etc. But what I really want is the web site that will tell me "you don't need a smart sock". Yes, that's a thing.
Of course I can just not buy a smart sock. But I pretty much know that at some point I'm going to buy some thing that's almost as useless because it's for the baby.
Some, like credit cards and other financial products, are especially bad since the payments per conversion (i.e. person who looks at the review site and then signs up for the credit card) can be massive. But even seemingly innocent niche markets, like light-weight backpacking equipment, can be full of affiliate marketing.
That said, just because a blog or website is influenced by affiliate marketing doesn't mean they don't have useful information in their reviews. They usually are accurate when describing a product's basic attributes. Where they typically bend the truth is when they're comparing products against each other (the one with higher affiliate payments is almost always better), or they simply won't talk about genuinely better products that don't pay for conversions.