Does Wirecutter ever feature a non affiliate product? If not, they are not to be trusted.
Their product is their reputation for good reviews. Destroying that is clearly against their interests.
I mean, that's exactly how bias works. In fact, this is exactly what amazon is cracking down on right now, incentivized reviews.
If your revenue model is based on ads, you grow revenue by growing readership which is grown by writing quality content. However if you're revenue model is based on affiliate income, you increase revenue by selling more stuff.
Well... not exactly...
They're cracking down on incentivized reviews on amazon.com product pages. Those onsite reviews being a far stretch away from offsite recommendation blog posts that feature affiliate links, which aren't included in any of their product rating/review metrics.
The review for a particular product isn't an example of pay for play because the Wirecutter gets paid for anything they review that is sold on Amazon. The bias is the push towards Amazon vs Newegg or Walmart and assessments if price based on ephemeral Amazon pricing vs MSRP.
The Amazon crackdown as I understand is about corrupt vendors incentivizing good reviews for shit product.
For example, if vendors know that the site is reviewing their products, they can provide support or a higher level of service to the review and influence the rating.
Magazines like Consumer Reports go to great lengths to bake bias out of reviews, and avoid this sort of risk. But their process has its own problems, as it requires that the reviewers really deeply understand the product, or biases ratings towards customer satisfaction.
My own car (my trusty Honda Pilot with 300k miles) is an example. It featured a poorly handled transmission defect and recall, yet CR scored a very high expected reliability rating, due to historical owner satisfaction.
Caveat emptor applies as always but I agree with you the Wirecutter is a generally good review site.
Is there any evidence to suggest Wirecutter has refused to rate an item due to lack of affiliate links?
If a product isn't on Amazon where affiliate links can point at it, then is it even mainstream enough for The Wirecutter's intended audience?
With that in mind I like the affiliate link model because arguably they can choose any product (in their case the 'best' one) instead of cutting deals with the companies directly (i.e. introducing competition in who pays the most).
They're probably the least biased reviewers out there at the moment and take it very seriously.
Maybe I wont get the best USB power adapter for my car, but I'll be able to choose from a small menu of them, and will probably get something good. And I can skip reading through hundreds of amazon reviews, many of which are totally irrelevant.
They've earned a great reputation in spite of them.
One strategy would be to discount them somehow. If they give something a great review, don't trust it entirely, but remember it if you also see 5 other good reviews.