They are beholden with affiliate links. Which means their financial success depends on you buying through their websites.

At a minimum, that means you won't get to learn about smaller niche stores like JetPens.com (very good for stationary / high-quality pens), since such small stores don't have any affiliate links for Wirecutter to make money from.

As old and outdated as Consumer Reports is... they're clearly primarily driven through reader-contributions. There's a degree of independence through that methodology that affiliate links / advertisements / etc. etc. fails to replicate.

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Speaking of which: Jetpens.com, and other smaller niche online stores, do manage to solve the problem to some degree. Their blogposts about their products is certainly "shilling their store", but they review a wide enough variety of products that they've earned my trust. They aren't shilling for any particular company, they're simply shilling for their wares.

I guess smaller webstores really do have that advantage. As long as they have good and useful reviews on their blog ( https://www.jetpens.com/blog ), I'm going to be reading their posts and possibly buying their stuff. Yeah, its shilling their own website, but that's something that most people understand innately when they read the blog.

There's also a quality-level associated with the store brand: JetPens doesn't offer cheap or low-quality pens. You can pretty much buy stuff at random and get good stationary. Careful control of the store's inventory is clearly important to building a brand.

After all, if I wanted cheap stuff, I'd go to Amazon (or Walmart) instead. I'm going to JetPens because I feel like a premium quality pen or pencil.

This seems to suggest they won't recommend a product if they can't make an affiliate deal off of it, which is not the case. Yes, they make money through these links, but I've not seen a case of them not referring to a good product because it is not available on a store they have an affiliate deal with. And if the product is their chosen product and no affiliate deal is there, they link to the brand store or other retailer.

There's at least one notable example of them pulling a recommendation when a manufacturer wouldn't provide an affiliate program:

https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729408

> This seems to suggest they won't recommend a product if they can't make an affiliate deal off of it, which is not the case.

It goes beyond and deeper than that.

Affiliate-based ad-model is beholden to Amazon for revenue. If Amazon launches their own review site (ex: leveraging the Washington Post brand, as a hypothetical), then you can almost be assured that Wirecutter would be killed off. All Amazon has to do is stop paying paid affiliate-links and instead offer review services through Washington Post (and ONLY Washington Post).

We're beyond the point of simply having websites "function". We're at the stage of the internet where we need to consider how to build web-businesses / web-organizations that last for longer than 10 years, even in the face of unknown changes. Too many websites make short-term assumptions (such as "We can trust Amazon to keep giving us money perpetually"), and end up getting swallowed or shut-down as soon as those assumptions fail.

True: Amazon Affiliate links still are a decent source of money. But just two years ago, most people probably thought that Google Adsense money was good enough to be sustainable also. The collapse of the banner-ad money (as money has shifted to Youtube ads instead) has especially hit online sites (especially those without a Youtube presence) extremely hard.

No financial connection to jetpens, but I've ordered from them a number of times and always are delighted.

Wirecutter, like Consumer Reports, initially had sterling recommendations. Well-researched, well-tested, and following the reviewer through the process was half the fun.

Lately the reviews I've seen are selecting for what Amazon link will perform for them, rather than truly what product (available via Amazon or other retailers) is the best product or value. I've found their picks frequently have bimodal ratings, with a large chunk of users hating the product.

so far I've only had good or great experiences with stuff I've actually purchased based on their articles. I find the site is great for items where you don't care too much about the category but just want a decent example. I would never buy computer hardware based on a Wirecutter review, but I'll happily buy any kitchen equipment under $50 based on their review alone.

in my reading, most of the Wirecutter recommendations that turn out to be suboptimal suffer from flaws that only surface six months into ownership, far longer than you can reasonably expect a reviewer to test a cheap product.

the one truly dubious article I've read is the "best small saucepan" review where their top pick is a tramontina product. tramontina's line was getting rave reviews from all the cooking sites/communities a couple years ago, but it appears to have gone downhill since they recently switched manufacturers. the article was updated this year, but makes no mention of the current quality discussion...

This coincides with my own impressions: WC article and recommendation quality has nosedived in service of affiliate links and margin-seeking. The "self-care" articles in particular seem a very transparent excuse to push a basket of sort-of irrelevant items that Wirecutter would very much like you to buy today.