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This brings up an interesting point though from another book I read "Sway" from Ori Brafman. There's a chapter called Compensation and Cocaine, and they talk about some research done on the brain when money is involved. And basically, a part of your brain turns on when money is involved. So even if you are trying to do something altruistic, as soon as money was involved people immediately started acting differently and part of their brain took over the process. It was like you have "two different engines" and they can't work at the same time, even if you as above think you can. I'm not exactly arguing against any of your points, just that this 2 brain thing when money is involved is super interesting, and maybe adds bias even for the most awesome of people that just shouldn't be there.

That's certainly an interesting and relevant point. I would like to shift gears for a second and come back to why I don't think it should be particularly relevant here.

First of all, I think we focus way too often on the "average" or "median" behavior when trying to define how humans behave. In a lot of cases (optimizing a website or arranging a retail outlet), this makes perfect sense. In many areas, this is misapplied.

Imagine that a researcher did a study on dunking a basketball. They are very careful to take an appropriately-representative sample of a country's population, and they find that something like 0.5% (totally made up) of the people can dunk on a standard 10-foot basket. They find that lowering the basket to 9 feet allows about 5-10% to be able to dunk, and they provide arguments for why this 5-10% figure is an ideal number for maximal excitement of a basketball game. We can clearly see that this is a bad reason to use for lowering an NBA hoop to 9 feet. NBA players are extraordinary, and appealing to the average is silly.

In the same way, I think this could be regarded as a similar case. Clearly only a small percentage of the population is capable of writing good reviews. It is automatically narrowed to people who are capable of writing not only clearly, but also in a way that makes a somewhat dull topic more interesting. We should be able to further narrow "good reviewers" to that group of reviewers who are always honest in their review, those (perhaps rare) people whose reviews are not swayed by potential monetary gain. And there are certainly people like this.

Perhaps what we really need is a way to differentiate the best across all kinds of categories, something like an NBA of professionals. Currently we rely on various magazines and news sources to select the best reviewers, but this narrows the field too much and too arbitrarily, while irrelevant things like seniority and past results affect judgment of a person's abilities. Perhaps it's time for the business/information world to take something from the sports world.

I've thought a lot about this, and long wondered why it's such a common feeling in journalism that ads (however speculative and low-quality) are somehow better than things like affiliate links.

If someone writes reviews (about lots of books, for example) and all of them have an affiliate link, regardless of whether it's a positive or negative review, and they state clearly, somewhere (rather somewhere on their blog/site than in every link) that they get a percentage of each copy sold, I think that's a good thing. I think they should, and they should tell the reader that if they buy the book via this link, they help support the magazine.

Combined with BrandonM's suggestion to steer readers in the "right" direction, and point them to another item instead ("this book wasn't that good, but this book about a similar subject is worth picking up!), that's a nice service which nobody should have to be ashamed about.

Of course this suggests that readers have a reason to trust you, but then again (as BrandonM points out): If they don't, why are they reading your review?

"You can usually identify affiliate links pretty easily just by scanning the URL."

The problem is that most people barely know what an affiliate link is, let alone spot one. This fact makes producing biased reviews attractive and that's why I think the answer to nate's question should be: generally they are.

Personally I don't trust a review when I see an affiliate link. A 'sponsored link' disclaimer would reestablish my trust though.

I would argue that people with the capability to recognize an affiliate link should also have the intelligence/judgment necessary to determine whether a review is unbiased or not. In effect, I think a "sponsored link" disclaimer is pointless. Personally, when I see a such a disclaimer, I practically assume that the article will be slanted. I would rather make that judgment myself.

Furthermore, as I pointed out it's not only affiliate links that can slant a review. I'm taking any review I read with a grain of salt, and my estimation of the author's or publication's integrity is a large factor in how much faith I have in a review. This is why it is such a big deal when stories come out like the TechCrunch author who demanded merchandise in exchange for reviews.

I agree - if I saw "sponsored link" in a review, I would assume that the review itself was somehow sponsored.

Perhaps some other type of notice would be more appropriate, but I can't think of what that would be.

To me a statement which is somewhat prominent on the page, always in the same place, stating that we always use affiliate links in our reviews, explaining what affiliate links are and that, if you are interested in buying the book, you can help support the blog/magazine by buying it via their link, would be a good thing.

I agree, but I'm not so sure that it has to be prominent. I think it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the footer, as long as the footer is visible at the end of a typical review. I also feel like it would make sense for some sites to have a "How do we make money?" page. Not only does it promote openness and integrity, but as a satisfied visitor to such a site I would probably try to do what I could to help that site make money. That could mean turning off adblocker for that site, buying a recommended product through an affiliate link, or even giving a direct donation. Call me crazy, but I think people who appreciate and get value from a company are willing to do what they can to help that company out.