The Wirecutter has a good business model here. Do the leg-work and review and compare the products to find the best. Make money on affiliate links for those products.
People who go to that site to research a product want to be sold to. They want to give their attention and money up for a product. Advertisements on websites are completely backwards from that model.
Most content cannot live out of affiliate links, unless you want your website splattered with bullshit product placement everywhere so content creators can earn a dime.
Affiliate marketing is a niche and bigger joke than traditional ads when content depends on it. Wirecutter just happens to be really good at what they do, but their business model can't be used by most of the web, not to mention ad blockers often block affiliate links too.
I agree that most affiliate link systems are abused and lead to a mess.
> Wirecutter just happens to be really good at what they do
By having automated software to block the bullshit, we might end up with an Internet where the people who are "really good at what they do" get more attention.
There's no software that "automatically blocks affiliate bullshit", there are tens of thousands sites similar to Wirecutter with the exact same business model. Some of them are just bullshit, some of them are not.
On the other hand, sites whose content doesn't work well with affiliate links are getting screwed by people blocking their only source of revenue, which is ads.
> There's no software that "automatically blocks affiliate bullshit"
I'm not claiming that there is software for that. But if it becomes annoying enough I think there will be software written to filter it. Even if it needs to make use of deep learning or some other more advanced mechanism just to detect.
> On the other hand, sites whose content doesn't work well with affiliate links are getting screwed by people blocking their only source of revenue, which is ads.
This is short-term thinking. The people who block ads will not be making purchasing decisions based on ads they don't want to see. So by showing ads to them all you are doing is devaluing advertisements and driving down the cost of advertising placement in the long term.
The only way around this is to make people enjoy ads. This is possible, but it requires work to integrate them with the content and you need the content creators actually making the ads, and they need to enjoy doing it.
> I'm not claiming that there is software for that. But if it becomes annoying enough I think there will be software written to filter it. Even if it needs to make use of deep learning or some other more advanced mechanism just to detect.
No, that won't be possible. You can't make a bot that discerns between "good" content like the Wirecutter and a site that's exactly the same, except with top 10s that are paid for.
> This is short-term thinking. The people who block ads will not be making purchasing decisions based on ads they don't want to see. So by showing ads to them all you are doing is devaluing advertisements and driving down the cost of advertising placement in the long term.
That's not how advertising works and the concept that freeloaders who block ads would somehow be more immune to advertising that people who don't is laughable.
> The only way around this is to make people enjoy ads. This is possible, but it requires work to integrate them with the content and you need the content creators actually making the ads, and they need to enjoy doing it.
Let's make content tailored around advertising, that's quite the way to make the web a useless place where there's no place for content that can't be used to sell something.
We have computers automatically labelling complex images, deep learning is doing all sorts of things we once thought only humans could do. Detecting shitty websites seems pretty trivial by comparison. If I can easily see the difference, I bet we can train a network to detect the same.
> That's not how advertising works and the concept that freeloaders who block ads would somehow be more immune to advertising that people who don't is laughable.
Nonsense. Even my kids know to avoid advertising when it inadvertently pops up on YouTube. They mute the audio and go do something else while the ad runs. People develop an ability to ignore banner ads on websites, the impact of advertising lessens over time, which leads advertisers to try more and more invasive and repulsive techniques.
> Let's make content tailored around advertising, that's quite the way to make the web a useless place where there's no place for content that can't be used to sell something.
You misunderstand my point.
Tailored advertising is fantastic. Listen to a Podcast. 95% of the Podcast is still original, non-advertisement content. The 5% lead-in advert is original, funny, and read by the creators of the show that I want to listen to.
More advertising should be vetted and created by the content creators who want the support of those advertisers. It makes better advertisements, it increases trust, and it's far more pleasant to read, hear or watch.
People who go to that site to research a product want to be sold to. They want to give their attention and money up for a product. Advertisements on websites are completely backwards from that model.