The Gravy Train Has Left the Station
Noodling on the current state of commerce journalism
Reviewed is closing. If I’m honest, I never really read it. I knew plenty of people that worked there, including some dear friends. But I still never broke the personal habit of starting pretty much all of my product research at Wirecutter, then moving to more niche, topic-specific outlets. I have my gripes with The New York Times—both with how it’s managed its portfolio of brands like Wirecutter and The Athletic and their Israel-Paletstine coverage—but Wirecutter has retained my trust since I left it in 2019.
Reviewed actually pre-dates Wirecutter. It’s older than my younger sister. (Does that count as a flex?) Its origin is a html site built by a 12-year-old. (That’s definitely a flex.) She turned it into a network of sites, devoted to reviewing a bunch of different styles of gear. By college, Robin Liss had a bunch of actual employees.
And now it’s dead. Gannett says the reason is Google. If I’m allowed to speculate widely, maybe it’s because management has been making absolute dogshit decisions for years? Didn’t we learn not to organize our media companies around the whims of tech platforms when everyone pivoted to podcasts? Or was that short-form video? Or was that social media? How is organizing your outlet to maximize possible traffic from Google search any different?
I simply cannot stomach these claims from a company that, not one year ago, was publishing AI-generated product reviews with fake bylines. A company that displays constant open disdain towards its unionized employees1, who found out the company was closing the same day we all did. By that point, they had spent almost two full years fighting to get Gannett to agree to give them a contract.
An argument they aren’t making, but that I could definitely believe, is that there are so many more outlets a reader can go to than there were in the 90s. It’s not just Wirecutter, pretty much all the major media outlets have pretty robust affiliate revnue generating operations now. CNN Underscored. NBC Select. Business Insider Reviews. Every single Condé Nast property. (BIG DISCLAIMER: I write for several of those and will probably try to write for others because all my editors there are extremely nice.)
I think the problem is more about a gap between the expectation executives have for commerce journalism and the reality of actually doing the work. After the Times bought Wirecutter in 2016, it seems like a lot of outlets rushed to enter the space all at the same time. Commerce content looked like the gravy train execs needed to pay their enormous salaries as their lunch was being eaten by Facebook.
Many of them started off trying to literally copy the Wirecutter formula, with extremely detailed buying guides to entire product categories. They learned testing 16 blenders (only after eliminating 40+ other terrible options available) takes a ton of time. And if you do it right, your final process probably only includes a recommendation for three or four products. You’re mostly telling the reader what NOT to buy.
Best case scenario: these stories are great, get a lot of readers, and earn you some money. But you can only publish so many of these so often, even if for some reason you have an endless budget to hire as many people to work on these types of stories you want. Not to quote fuckass Tony Stark but … no amount of money ever bought a single second of time.
I’m editing this on my iPad, and it’s not letting me add a caption directly to the photo. Anyway, this is what it looks like when you’re getting ready to test Bluetooth speakers for the 2020 version of this story. I was … not popular in the GQ office.
So you flesh out the business with stuff that you can do a lot faster: new release roundups, deal posts, brand explainers, single-product odes, head-to-head comparison posts. If you’re doing it right, these stories feed into each other. This is something The Strategist (another place I’ve worked), does really well. You’ll rarely find a daily deals post of theirs that doesn’t include a link to a story they’ve already written on something that’s been discounted.
Actually building that back catalog isn’t easy, unless you’re willing to take shortcuts. (See: AI authors at Reviewed and CNET.) You need a staff of really sharp writers and editors who are devoted to their audience. People who can write to their readers as if they are smart people who don’t want to get fleeced. Who will center reader trust above any other goals, even if they have to sacrifice money to do so. That’s why legacy outlets like Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated have been mostly fine in the transition from print only to affiliate. The audience trusts their process.
I’m no media executive, but I think a bunch of them are starting to realize the juice isn’t worth the squeeze at the same time. The apex of commerce optimism was probably at some point early in the pandemic when everyone was online shopping like there was no tomorrow. (We genuinely thought there might not be?) But now that affiliate links are everywhere, and people have way more places to spend an increasingly smaller amount of money, I think we’ll start to look at the end of Reviewed as the canary in the commerce coal mine.
An inside look at what testing cold brew makers for Wirecutter looked like in 2019.
Another possible indicator: Dow Jones very publicly launched Buy Side from WSJ, a commerce operation distinct from the newsroom, right around the same time I joined said newsroom in 2022. After I was let go, I noticed on LinkedIn that a bunch of people who once worked at Buy Side no longer had jobs there and that publishing on the site has slowed A LOT. Something is happening there, and I’d probably know what it was if I still worked there. But I don’t!
I hope all this makes execs really THINK about whether they are willing to put in the effort and MONEY it takes to sustain and build a commerce outlet. Because at this point, if you’re a major outlet hoping to start one and scale it up into a significant part of your business, it’s probably too late. Commerce didn’t save BuzzFeed. Commerce didn’t save Vice. It won’t save you.
And honestly, the fact that you don’t have one probably makes you kinda cool?2
For most people though, cool doesn’t pay the bills. I have gone through many cycles about how I feel about mostly writing stories about things people can buy. I’m currently more optimistic. At its best, the affiliate link is symbiotic. If someone you trusts recommends something that you think would enhance your life, using their affiliate link to get it is a way to pay them for your work.
Remember Jay Fielden’s weird “I’m leaving Esquire” Insta post? Here was my “I’m leaving Wirecutter” Twitter post.
There are obvious pitfalls here. Jonah and Erin of Blackbird Spyplane, the rare Substack that never uses affiliate links, articulated a lot of these in a post earlier this summer. The main one is that it creates a conflict of interest that mostly encourages writers and influencers to write about more and more and more stuff. The more stuff there is on your site/social page/video/whatever, the more likely someone will buy something that makes you money.
If they missed anything in their post about the topic though, it’s reader memory. If you spam people too much, they’ll stop taking your recommendations. You have to make recommendations you can stand behind if you want people to come back to you for advice ever again. Sure, you can design your entire business around churning through people as if they are idiot fish. They’ll wise up.
And anyway, it’s so much harder to find new readers than it is to just put good stuff for the readers you already have.
Your regularly scheduled DV Digest will be back this Wednesday. Also, if you made it this far, you should subscribe to LEG DAY, my newsletter about pursuing joy as a city cyclist. I write long like this there a LOT.
A) They made the members to host an election instead of voluntarily recognizing that a vast majority of the eligible members wanted to be in one B) Got super testy about WHO should be considered eligible and kept proposing weird hierarchies that literally made no sense when you think about how stories are made C) Refused to show up to bargaining meetings they scheduled forcing the union to go on strike … TWICE
One example I think is really interesting: The Washington Post. Despite being owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, they still don’t seem to have any affiliate verticals. Maybe this is something their new CEO is trying to get them to work on. I hope it isn’t.