I'm not really sure what to think of that site. I think it's above average for an affiliate marketing site, but I also wonder how reliable the recommendations are if they're derived from automated analysis of other systems like reviews, pricing, etc. when we know those are garbage systems that are constantly gamed. Even filtered, it's still garbage in garbage out, right?
I think that (affiliate based monetization) is a really, really tough market to be in right now because Google and Bing are absolutely _dominated_ by low effort, garbage affiliate marketing blog spam sites. There are days where I'd pay per search if I could filter out sites that have affiliate links on them.
The review / product discovery market as a whole is a disaster right now. The last good review site (IMO) was JonnyGURU and there hasn't been a new PSU review there since early 2019 (since Corsair hired him?). The thing that made that site great was that shitty products got shitty scores. It's not like the affiliate marketing reviewers nowadays where everything is 9.5 stars with the primary goal of getting you to buy _anything_ they can slap an affiliate link on. Even the site in this article is a bit guilty of that. "Here's a list of good value products that you can just buy without thinking," right?
Off topic... If the site owner is lurking, I'd love to know why sites like Anandtech, or almost every review site from what I can tell, stopped doing endurance testing on SSDs now that manufacturers are packing them with shit quality TLC and QLC.
Not sure about why Anandtech stopped endurance testing, but I would assume cost cutting. I left the company in Sept. 2018 which was right after it was acquired by Future PLC. They're a frugal lot.
I looked through the product listings a bit (I mentioned it elsewhere) and they look reasonable for things I've researched lately. I hope it works out for you because there's a huge lack of trustworthy product data and massive amounts of trash to sort through these days.
I'd probably be your target market. I'm usually looking for products that are good value. Ignoring the fact that I'm from Canada and all your links are US, I'm also the kind of person that would make an effort to buy via one of your affiliate links if I used your site as a source for products I want to research more in depth. However, I don't think most people would make that effort and maybe that'll be a problem.
Put another way, it looks like a great site to use as a starting point for products I don't know much about, but I'm going to jump to other in-depth review sites before buying anything and might convert through their affiliate links instead. Add in sweet (get it?) industrial scale affiliate link hijackers plus price watching services like CamelCamelCamel and all of a sudden there are a lot of ways I can use your site and never give anything back (unintentionally).
I'm also not sure I'll remember your site to go back to it (sorry). I wonder how a browser addon would work out. The no ad, no tracking design of the site lends a lot of credibility in terms of being trustworthy, so I'd consider installing an addon for the type of data you have. If you can build a reputation as the brand that filters Amazon down to the X% of products that aren't garbage, that might get some traction.
For example, if I'm browsing Amazon and could click on a GCAF addon that showed me a curated list of similar products that aren't complete trash, that would be helpful to me because there's too much garbage to sort through manually on Amazon. Once I'm on the product page (via your affiliate link in the addon), I might open a new tab to read other reviews, but I'm not going to click back through to the product page when I already have it open in another tab. Or if you sort by products that are currently on sale I might just open tabs for the ones on sale and just buy something right there.
I also manually jump from Amazon to BestBuy before buying stuff. If the pricing is close enough I buy it at BestBuy instead. If I could click an addon that linked me directly to the same product page at other stores I think you could capture that too, at least from me.
I think reviews, especially something honest like the site in this article is aspiring towards, might be an ok market because the quality of those sites has declined so much in the last decade that I think there's room for a much better product.
However, it's the affiliate based monetization that I was calling tough. At least for me, an affiliate link is an untrustworthy link because that link is working for the manufacturers and retailers, not me.
I can't think of a decent way to monetize a review site without relying on a revenue stream that's susceptible to corruption (product access, affiliate links, advertising, etc.). Just look at the whole Hardware Unboxed / Nvidia thing that happened recently. The whole review industry must be completely FUBAR for Nvidia to think they could get away with that.
> Just look at the whole Hardware Unboxed / Nvidia thing that happened recently.
Can you expand on this? I hadn't heard of this.
I recently watched a new video on "playthrough” of Cyberpunk and it was a heavily advertising the power of a NVIDIA graphics card as he jacked up the raytracing settings and mentioning the card (which the comments section said was mean because it was impossible to find in the marketplace and/or costs thousands).
Nvidia cut Hardware Unboxed off from review samples because they weren't happy with the editorial. Nvidia specifically said that "should your editorial direction change, we will reconsider..."
I think that (affiliate based monetization) is a really, really tough market to be in right now because Google and Bing are absolutely _dominated_ by low effort, garbage affiliate marketing blog spam sites. There are days where I'd pay per search if I could filter out sites that have affiliate links on them.
The review / product discovery market as a whole is a disaster right now. The last good review site (IMO) was JonnyGURU and there hasn't been a new PSU review there since early 2019 (since Corsair hired him?). The thing that made that site great was that shitty products got shitty scores. It's not like the affiliate marketing reviewers nowadays where everything is 9.5 stars with the primary goal of getting you to buy _anything_ they can slap an affiliate link on. Even the site in this article is a bit guilty of that. "Here's a list of good value products that you can just buy without thinking," right?
Off topic... If the site owner is lurking, I'd love to know why sites like Anandtech, or almost every review site from what I can tell, stopped doing endurance testing on SSDs now that manufacturers are packing them with shit quality TLC and QLC.