The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" hasn't meant anything for decades.
It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with cheap, but price aggregators are all either blocked out of existence or become affiliate listings.
While so many things have come true, there are still a few internet dreams like free-flow price summaries and wisdom-of-the-honest-crowd which are sadly still just beyond our grasp.
I recently decided to get a Consumer Reports subscription after not having one for 10 years. I used it to find the absolute BEST dishwasher.
But because their rating system is a little strange, and they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT, I ended up with a Dishwasher I hate. It was the most expensive, and best according to CR, but I cannot express how miserable this piece of junk makes me.
Then I look at the FREE reviews on Amazon, where I see many people who have the exact same issues as me. Why did I pay for Consumer Reports? According to their "tests" this dishwasher might last 20 years or something amazing like that, but for what I care about it sucks, its hard to use, and it doesn't dry dishes AT ALL.
I want to fund unbiased reviews, but I also need Consumer Reports or others to step up their game on providing information that is actually useful and changes my experience as a buyer.
It's somewhat of a recursive lemon problem. We (potential review purchasers) have no way to assure ourselves that we'd be paying for quality reviews and not some sort of fakes, in no small part because of the profusion of ever more convincing fake everything on the internet.
For me, I feel like wisdom-of-the-honest crowd is actually somewhat attainable. If you can find corroborating reviews across different review providers (Amazon, google, etc) then I've found that the information is much more likely to be true.
Amazing to see people stumbling upon millions. Most techies are trying to come up with clever technical solutions to try and build an online business. Whilst elsewhere there are people making millions from reviewing mattresses. Or whatever the next accidental hot market will be.
Review sites in any niche industry can be extremely popular. I am a guitarist, and there are a LOT of blogs and Youtube channel reviewing guitars, amps and pedals. Most are pretty boring, technical reviews which aren't all bad, but get a handful of views.
Then there are the channels that thrive on drama and conflict. One particular guitar reviewer is an older chap, with questionable playing skills and knowledge, but he excels in riling up companies, which in turn leads to more publicity and views for him.
He is well known for taking expensive electronic gear apart and saying things like "I can't believe they charge $2000 for this guitar effects processor when I know the motherboard and DSP chips on here only cost $200... etc.". When the company refutes these claims or tried to explain, he shuts them down with demands for payment to remove his negative reviews etc.
We cannot expect much more though - a whole generation of audience has been trained to seek out such drama and negative energy and latch on to it like a remora to a shark.
> Whilst elsewhere there are people making millions from reviewing mattresses
True, but from what I read, this guy had SEO experience and ranked #1 for "Casper Mattress Review" for many years. In other words he was clever at marketing his site which was stuffed with affiliate links along with 1 on 1 agreements with some mattress companies.
Most techies who are coming up with "clever technical solutions" either don't validate a need for their offering, or really suck (add me to this list) at marketing their solutions / online businesses.
A friend of mine made a fair bit of money off of a website that listed "free stuff" promotions around the web. But it was manually-maintained and so quickly died.
... BUT...
He really only started making ad revenue on the site once he stopped maintaining it! People would find his site, then would realize the content was old, but would click on an up-to-date ad instead.
I'd say affiliate marketing is more of a modern "lemonade stand" business, just like youtube/twitch videos, game programming, and app development. There's an extremely low barrier to entry and it gives you an ideal place to hone business skills, but odds are you won't make enough to cover the cost of hosting a website.
I don't find it that amazing having worked at large companies and watched middle to upper management do the same.
I try not to play the envy game lest I just self loathe. Luck has always existed. Also, tales like these help keep me humble and I just assume there is a cognitive dissonance and their talents are valuable even if I can't see how.
The whole mattress industry is a scam. Actual manufacturing cost is $75-$300. Mattresses are even cheaper on Alibaba.
Vacuum-packing memory foam shrinks mattresses for shipping, and now they can be imported easily.
If you really want to annoy the US mattress industry, set up a review site and review sub-$100 mattresses off Alibaba.
(Personally, I have an air bed which cost about $200.)
The irony here being, after I read this article, I'm now seeing ads for mattresses all over the web due to the embedded ads in the article. Marketing and advertising feels more like a virus than anything these days.
I've found Ikea to be a great place to buy a mattress. No shady sales tactics or aggressive salesmen, several models you can physically try out in the store, and good quality/value.
I went in there a couple of years ago, and bought a full-sized Sultan Havberg after trying a few out (it looks like they don't sell this anymore, but you can find it in their product catalog - http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/buying_guides_fy15/Mattress...)
At the time it felt fine, but when it arrived I found it nearly impossible to sleep on. I could feel the springs pressing into me as I inevitably rolled around over them. I guess you get what you pay for.
Fortunately a friend of mine whose girlfriend was moving in was giving away a memory foam mattress topper, which has turned it from one of the worse beds I've owned into the best bed I've owned.
It's really hard to anticipate how a mattress will actually feel when you try to sleep on it, and I recommend not skimping on one.
Seconded. Their latex mattresses are amazing if you are looking for a firm mattress, and priced significantly cheaper than anything else on the market. I have owned two over the last 14 years and both have been amazing: assisted in easing back pain and making my sleep more restful.
There is similar situation in the diamond engagement ring market, of all places! NiceIce, Beyond4Cs, Yourdiamondteacher, ProsumerDiamonds -- all affiliate marketing blogs that drive a lot of sales. No lawsuit yet to reveal the inner workings, but undoubtedly there is the same shadiness.
The mattress industry is a total scam. Nest Bedding's CEO, the one that was quoted in the article, even goes so far as to threaten people who post negative reviews on Yelp. I left a one-star review on their website, but it doesn't even appear in their product ratings. The ratings distribution on Nest's website is statistically impossible!
Other companies aren't any better. Casper cheapened the materials used in their mattress, but is still riding on positive reviews for the original model which used latex (more expensive) as a top layer.
Now this made me thinking of other online review sites. Are they all like that?
I couldn't give an honest review, if I get more money from B than A. So if they state otherwise, I call it fraud
And I know that's what people call marketing in general and there might be some truth in it - but that's why you go to these review site to get a neutral view.
So normally the customer should pay the reviewer, he is doing work for him, because when the company pays the reviewer ...
Yes. Any online review should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The vast majority are influenced by affiliate payments.
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.
This is the reason why I’m traditional journalism there is a very strict divide between the content and business sides of the company. The journalists don’t know about the deals, and the business side don’t get to provide input on the content side. Unfortunately in these smaller, newer forms of content business, those concerns are just ignored.
There are very few review sites for any given product / service that aren't in the pocket of businesses through things like referral systems and sponsorships. It's an industry.
This is how the entire affiliate industry works. Content curators will generally pick the most profitable products to promote, not always but most of the time. I tried to explain that here to the HN crowd that the wirecutter reviews fall into the same affiliate bias but got downvotes to hell. The mere fact that most of their products point to amazon should tell you that they cannot possibly claim to give an honest review. I say this knowing there will be a ton of replies telling me I’m wrong but sure, what would a super affiliate know anything about that...
I'm shocked that no one has posted https://www.themattressunderground.com/ yet. It is totally worth a look. The amount of technical detail is right up HN's alley.
Full disclosure: I paid nothing to the site, but used it to find a local mattress shop (and manufacturer) and purchased a mid-range queen mattress at a good price. Apparently the shop owner had received quite a few referrals from them, but he never paid them or received any payment from them.
The whole online mattress industry has a bit of a stink to it. Here in Australia, I have been stalked for months by a particular brand of online mattress, Koala(?), on my Facebook feed, which I ignored, but on the past few weeks, I see the SAME ads on FB with the SAME girl in them etc., sold as a completely new brand.
I assume the original company either went bankrupt or received a C&D from somewhere and had to change their name. But this does nothing at all to increase my confidence in these online sellers. Welcome to the Cialis of 2017...
I don't think it's possible to implement an affiliate program in a completely ethical way.
Even if you try to make your reviews fair and honest you will still have a subconscious bias to give every product as high score as possible, because high scores generate affiliate purchases.
Not VC-funded, but MoneySavingExpert which is a fairly well regarded and large UK site for people interested in financial products, FI, etc was sold by its owner in 2012 for £87M. It makes most or all of its money from affiliate links, although it has a transparency policy where links that make money for the site have an asterisk next to them, and they also include (but not as prominently) non-affiliate links.
There are some revenue numbers in the Wikipedia page:
Personally, I think it's not a terrible way in making some sort of revenue. As long as it's honest and doesn't try to manipulate their potential customers. I'm trying to make some revenue from Udemy affiliation using my Twitter account as it relates to my profile and I don't see why others shouldn't be doing it as well.
I think it's a perfectly legitimate way of making money, so long as users aren't deliberately deceived into getting a worse deal to get a better deal for the company
Many podcasters are in the same boat, though they try to mask it. I only listen to probably 3 podcasts, but I hear the same sponsor reads on a daily basis. Casper, Fracture, Betterment, Warby-Parker, etc. The reads given by these sponsors are only guidelines, the better podcasters personalize them to make them sound like real endorsements not just ad reads.
This reminds me a lot of the web hosting industry, which also has a huge issue with questionable review sites set up for affiliate payments and hosting companies owning supposedly neutral sites about the industry.
There are at least a few active forums you can ask about good hosting companies on (which is something the mattress buying process seems to lack), but then you have to deal with astroturfing and companies 'hinting' that you should use their service in every post.
Either way, I think these industries (and many others) are in this situation because the internet has just made good, high quality journalism unprofitable. Along with clickbait and actual lies, it seems affiliate commissions are where the money is in writing nowadays, meaning there's a huge incentive to write pandering crap and an equally large disincentive to care about being a truly helpful source for this information.
Felt about right for the complexity of the story and the thoroughness of the research. I think we should be encouraging long form journalism, not falling back to click-bait news.
Sad thing is even with full disclosures there are vast numbers of people who will not read the disclosure. Some sites do a bang up job of making the disclosures so unnoticeable that they never lose a referral.
[+] [-] mwexler|8 years ago|reply
It's a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won't pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service/trust with cheap, but price aggregators are all either blocked out of existence or become affiliate listings.
While so many things have come true, there are still a few internet dreams like free-flow price summaries and wisdom-of-the-honest-crowd which are sadly still just beyond our grasp.
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|8 years ago|reply
I recently decided to get a Consumer Reports subscription after not having one for 10 years. I used it to find the absolute BEST dishwasher.
But because their rating system is a little strange, and they don't exactly tell you BUY THIS, DONT BUY THAT, I ended up with a Dishwasher I hate. It was the most expensive, and best according to CR, but I cannot express how miserable this piece of junk makes me.
Then I look at the FREE reviews on Amazon, where I see many people who have the exact same issues as me. Why did I pay for Consumer Reports? According to their "tests" this dishwasher might last 20 years or something amazing like that, but for what I care about it sucks, its hard to use, and it doesn't dry dishes AT ALL.
I want to fund unbiased reviews, but I also need Consumer Reports or others to step up their game on providing information that is actually useful and changes my experience as a buyer.
[+] [-] zipwitch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fierro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhilWright|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
Then there are the channels that thrive on drama and conflict. One particular guitar reviewer is an older chap, with questionable playing skills and knowledge, but he excels in riling up companies, which in turn leads to more publicity and views for him.
He is well known for taking expensive electronic gear apart and saying things like "I can't believe they charge $2000 for this guitar effects processor when I know the motherboard and DSP chips on here only cost $200... etc.". When the company refutes these claims or tried to explain, he shuts them down with demands for payment to remove his negative reviews etc.
We cannot expect much more though - a whole generation of audience has been trained to seek out such drama and negative energy and latch on to it like a remora to a shark.
[+] [-] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
True, but from what I read, this guy had SEO experience and ranked #1 for "Casper Mattress Review" for many years. In other words he was clever at marketing his site which was stuffed with affiliate links along with 1 on 1 agreements with some mattress companies.
Most techies who are coming up with "clever technical solutions" either don't validate a need for their offering, or really suck (add me to this list) at marketing their solutions / online businesses.
[+] [-] Untit1ed|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inanutshellus|8 years ago|reply
... BUT...
He really only started making ad revenue on the site once he stopped maintaining it! People would find his site, then would realize the content was old, but would click on an up-to-date ad instead.
Accidental genius. :)
[+] [-] schnevets|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodablah|8 years ago|reply
I try not to play the envy game lest I just self loathe. Luck has always existed. Also, tales like these help keep me humble and I just assume there is a cognitive dissonance and their talents are valuable even if I can't see how.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
If you really want to annoy the US mattress industry, set up a review site and review sub-$100 mattresses off Alibaba.
(Personally, I have an air bed which cost about $200.)
[+] [-] sixdimensional|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mi100hael|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|8 years ago|reply
At the time it felt fine, but when it arrived I found it nearly impossible to sleep on. I could feel the springs pressing into me as I inevitably rolled around over them. I guess you get what you pay for.
Fortunately a friend of mine whose girlfriend was moving in was giving away a memory foam mattress topper, which has turned it from one of the worse beds I've owned into the best bed I've owned.
It's really hard to anticipate how a mattress will actually feel when you try to sleep on it, and I recommend not skimping on one.
[+] [-] Fezzik|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshuaEddy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rypskar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whitepoplar|8 years ago|reply
Other companies aren't any better. Casper cheapened the materials used in their mattress, but is still riding on positive reviews for the original model which used latex (more expensive) as a top layer.
[+] [-] vijayr|8 years ago|reply
It is just businesses competing to sell products - maybe a little too interested in suing, but business nevertheless.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|8 years ago|reply
I couldn't give an honest review, if I get more money from B than A. So if they state otherwise, I call it fraud And I know that's what people call marketing in general and there might be some truth in it - but that's why you go to these review site to get a neutral view.
So normally the customer should pay the reviewer, he is doing work for him, because when the company pays the reviewer ...
[+] [-] skewart|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danpalmer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kakarot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedaniel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b3lvedere|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saosebastiao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoryMO|8 years ago|reply
Full disclosure: I paid nothing to the site, but used it to find a local mattress shop (and manufacturer) and purchased a mid-range queen mattress at a good price. Apparently the shop owner had received quite a few referrals from them, but he never paid them or received any payment from them.
[+] [-] mrfusion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
I assume the original company either went bankrupt or received a C&D from somewhere and had to change their name. But this does nothing at all to increase my confidence in these online sellers. Welcome to the Cialis of 2017...
[+] [-] robbiep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzink|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liaukovv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|8 years ago|reply
There are some revenue numbers in the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoneySavingExpert.com
[+] [-] Distant_horizon|8 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2017/07/17/a-y-...
Edited typo.
[+] [-] michaelbrooks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ntzm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b3lvedere|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commenter1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greedo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|8 years ago|reply
There are at least a few active forums you can ask about good hosting companies on (which is something the mattress buying process seems to lack), but then you have to deal with astroturfing and companies 'hinting' that you should use their service in every post.
Either way, I think these industries (and many others) are in this situation because the internet has just made good, high quality journalism unprofitable. Along with clickbait and actual lies, it seems affiliate commissions are where the money is in writing nowadays, meaning there's a huge incentive to write pandering crap and an equally large disincentive to care about being a truly helpful source for this information.
[+] [-] gbbr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mckoss|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ak39|8 years ago|reply
I gave up when I felt I reached “risk of prolapse” time. Will finish it in another “sitting”.
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|8 years ago|reply