How Wirecutter Makes Money (2024)

To understand Wirecutter’s business, let’s start with affiliate marketing.

An online retailer such as Amazon or a direct-order company such as the mattress maker Leesa strikes deals with affiliate partners. These partners might be small blogs, Instagram influencers, coupon websites, or a rigorous product-recommendation site like Wirecutter.

Those affiliate partners often (though not always) earn a certain amount of money, typically a percentage of the product’s price, when someone buys a product through the links on the partners’ pages. This practice is known as affiliate marketing.

FTC guidelines for affiliate marketers stipulate that such commission-based relationships must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed, which is why Wirecutter and other websites have such language on every page where an affiliate link appears.

At Wirecutter, a strict wall exists between our editorial and commerce departments.

When we say that writers and editors “independently review everything we recommend,” we’re referring to how our journalists embark on Wirecutter’s exhaustive testing process (you can read more about the multitudinous steps in our breakdown of a Wirecutter guide) without consideration for how our recommendations will make Wirecutter money. Their only job is to decide what is the best.

This is not how things work at many other product-recommendation websites, where writers and editors are much more involved in the business outcomes and implications of the products they select. Their recommendations are often impacted by business considerations.

Ours are not.

Wirecutter’s commerce operation comes in after our writers and editors have made all their picks.

At this point—and only at this point—our business-side colleagues determine where to send links for products (Home Depot or Amazon? REI or Backcountry?) based on a puzzle of price, a website’s ease of use, shipping costs, customer service, and, yes, affiliate rates.

“The reader experience doesn’t end when you leave our site,” says Wirecutter’s executive director of commerce, Leilani Han. “When we’re choosing the retailers we’re sending our readers to, we’re sending them somewhere we would personally want to shop. That’s taking into consideration things like the ease of returns or shipping costs, or even how easy it is to add something to your cart. The reader experience comes first—before we consider the monetization aspect.”

The commerce team also accounts for the effect that being featured on Wirecutter has on a retailer: The site has to have enough inventory to fulfill a potential influx of orders.

“A Wirecutter pick is only as good as your ability to purchase it,” Leilani says. “If you go to a site, and the product isn’t in stock, then what are you supposed to do? We do a lot of work to find retailers that have the infrastructure and inventory to support a good experience for our readers.”

Ensuring the quality of a reader’s experience is the primary goal. In some cases, Wirecutter makes no money at all on a pick, simply because the only high-quality retailer that sells the item doesn’t run an affiliate program.

We won’t ever send our readers to a site that’s frustrating to use or a retailer with excessive shipping costs simply to make money at the expense of our relationship to our readers.

We can say definitively that no pick on Wirecutter has ever been sponsored by a manufacturer or retailer or anyone else. No product has ever been named as a pick because it would make our business more money.

For Wirecutter’s journalists, the revenue of our picks is thankfully not our responsibility—in accordance with Wirecutter policy, we’re not made aware of those relationships at all. If we say positive things about a product, it’s because we have tested it and found it recommendation-worthy.

Now, Wirecutter often makes money when it recommends a product, but we believe that our business’s interests align with those of the reader. If you’re unhappy with a product that you bought based on our recommendation, and you return it, Wirecutter doesn’t make any money. You would also be likely to stop taking our advice in the future.

But if we independently make great recommendations, and you’re happy with your purchases, we’ve succeeded in our journalistic mission, and our business makes money to further that mission.

There’s no incentive for us to give a bad recommendation, especially since the real cost of doing so is not just a few dollars—it’s the loss of your trust. The confidence that our readers have in our expertise is what has made Wirecutter a reliable friend (and yes, business) since 2011.

This article was edited by Amber Angelle and Ben Frumin.