[belval]

We should also ask ourselves if affiliate links are really that bad. Someone could be making honest complete reviews and monetizing those with affiliate links, does that inherently mean that the search results are lower quality?

That approach also misses all the copied-a-github-issue low-effort content that seem to crop up on Google.

[DamnableNook]

Anecdotally, I can say that I’ve definitely noticed a negative correlation between affiliate marketing and content quality, though I would be very interested in seeing a formal study of it.

Affiliate links create misaligned incentives between content creators and consumers. This includes on the products listed themselves, where the affiliate is incentivized to select the products that give the most kickback rather than the ‘best’ for the consumer. But it also includes the content itself. Affiliate links create incentive to (a) write reviews, where a site wouldn’t have bothered before; (b) churn out lots of content with lots of links, that can be picked up by search engines; and (c) to not invest much in the actual reviews, and instead generate quick, low-quality content, since the content creator doesn’t actually care about finding the “best” product (which takes lots of time and money to do correctly), only on having readers click their links.

This is why sites with names like Celeb Rumor Central have dozens of articles like “top 10 coffee makers 2024”. They just hire a freelancer to do a few quick Google searches for coffee makers, then churn out 10,000 word articles with sections like “the history of coffee” and “why do people drink coffee?” Then the actual review is “this machine is purported to boil water and drip it through coffee grounds, and has high ratings on Amazon (we may earn a small commission when you click a link on our site)”. Increasingly, they’re just using AI to do it, cutting out the cost of a freelancer.

In my personal opinion, affiliate marketing is one of the worst things to happen to the modern web, and the source of a ton of content farm SEO spam pages.

[ssharp]

There is a lot of money to be captured in paid search with these sites. There are some pretty large players in the space who just built these types of top 5 or top 10 pages for tons of verticals and then bid on keywords related to those verticals. They can go to brands and demand significantly higher fees than most affiliates would get and the brands will usually pay because that acquisition is usually more efficient than try to bid on the terms the affiliate is bidding on.

Back when I was still involved in acquisition marketing, I did a test where I killed all paid search and built relationships with the affiliates to negotiate our "ranking" higher up the page. It was a huge boom for business. We scaled paid acquisition at a profitable CAC, which was very difficult to maintain, let alone scale, in bidding directly and it was significantly less work to manage.

Consumers value this type of content quite a bit, even if many are skeptical of the quality. Sometimes it's nice to just see a pared down list of things with even a cursory rundown of features/differences.

[belval]

Sure but I feel like you are taking game theory and applying it to real life. See for example https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/gaming they do a lot of actual reviews with tests and all their links are affiliated. If as a Google user I want a review of Gaming Monitor, having this as the first link would likely be an acceptable-to-good scenario.

[thatoneguy]

It's bad because most of the reviews will be for items you can only get on Amazon or another retailer with an affiliate link program and not for items available elsewhere.

I've seen so many "Best $WHATEVER of $YEAR" and it's really "Best $WHATEVER $PRODUCED_BY_WEIRDLY_NAME_FLY_BY_NIGHT_COMPANY_ON_AMAZON $YEAR"

[anticorporate]

In theory, if we had truly open marketplaces that offered equal monetization of all links to all similar products in the same category regardless of the price offered to the consumer, sure.

In practice, that is never the case. At best you're getting reviews that only compare products available in the same marketplace (say, for example, all the table saws you can buy on Amazon). At worst, you're getting reviews from vendors who offer the highest payout.

Also, a heck of a lot of consumer products are absolute garbage. (IMHO, most of them, but others may feel differently.) Who is going to write an honest, scathing review of a product and then monetize the link to it? Why even bother?

[delichon]

How can an affiliate link not be in conflict with an unbiased review? They don't get paid if they don't recommend the thing.

[ska]

> that inherently mean that the search results are lower quality?

Almost? There doesn't need to be anything nefarious going on, but human beings align to incentives, basically always. So the trick with reviews is going to be to avoid any incentives coming from the product side, and embrace those coming from the consumer side.