affiliate marketing
HouseFresh and the challenges of affiliate content
You might have noticed a post from HouseFresh doing the rounds, especially if you have anything to do with creating content intended to generate affiliate revenue. It’s caused quite a stir, particularly among publishers.
My background is in product testing. My first job in publishing was in MacUser's testing labs, where we would regularly have 10–20 products in and – literally in some cases – take them apart to decide which one was best. Next door was the PC Pro labs, which did the same thing, on an even bigger scale. On a visit to New York a few years later, I went to the testing labs of a US publisher: even bigger, with people who looked like they should be wearing lab coats picking over the bones of machines. The product testers were real experts, often devising unique tests designed to stretch the products in ways which matched up the real-world pounding they would take.
But those were proper group tests. What HouseFresh is writing about is not those. Their focus is the “best” article, written specifically to deliver affiliate clicks and sales, and designed to hit a specific keyword.
The HouseFresh article rips the lid off some of the worst aspects of content written to deliver sales though affiliate links (I refuse point-blank to call it “comtent”, which has to be one of the worst words ever invented). Their biggest complaint is that a lot of the pages you will see which rank highly on Google for affiliate-led keywords are written by people who have never had the products in their hands, let alone tested them. They may have done desk research, which involves, at best, scouring spec sheets for hidden details and, at worst, just scouring the user reviews on Amazon. But that doesn't tell you all that much about a product and whether it's any good or not.
Of course, this is really Google's fault because it is rewarding low-quality content by ranking it highly. This content, which is far cheaper to produce than a real group test, can be churned out quickly. A quick writer can do one or two a day, while a group test might take two weeks to organise, test and write. Use an LLM and you can probably make that process even faster. Just make sure to write your prompt to make it include phrases like our lab tests and our experts said to satisfy Google's pretty surface-deep view of how content based on real-world experience works.
HouseFresh’s hope is that Google will improve its algorithms and start rewarding content which is of higher quality, but I have my doubts. I suspect that the company’s focus is on creating “answers engines”like Gemini, rather than the traditional ten blue links. And even if it can improve its algorithms to prioritise in-depth reviews, gaming the SEO system will often look like a better option to many of the kind of publishers HouseFresh is attacking: the ones who have bought well-known brands but now use them to churn out lower quality content.
There are, and will be, exceptions, mostly from publishers who have a heritage in creating brands, rather than the ones that buy brands just for their heritage. But the sheer volume of content created by others could drown them out—especially as LLMs make it easier to generate entire sites within days.
As I have pointed out, I believe businesses based on this kind of affiliate-led content will also be disrupted over the coming few years by conversational AI. Once people have the option of having a conversation with a smart recommendation engine to tailor buying advice to exactly their needs, “best XXX” articles based on desk research or mining Amazon reviews just won’t be good enough.
Google is a choke point for the affiliate content business, but it’s not the only one. The second is Amazon, where most publishers derive a large chunk of their affiliate revenue. Although reliable numbers are difficult to find, Datanyze estimates Amazon has around 48% of the market share in affiliate networks, and anecdotally, I suspect the amount of revenue that brings in for publishers is higher still. Every publisher I know has sought to reduce their exposure to Amazon, especially after the effective demise of its Onsite Associates programme (known internally as OSP), changes in policy from Amazon would have a massive effect on publishers. But the reality is that if Amazon turned off the taps, or even reduced them, publishers with big investments in affiliate content production would be in trouble.
Would Amazon do this? It depends if you believe that Cory Doctorow’s enshittification cycle applies to it:
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Are we at the point where Amazon starts to claw back the revenue it shares with its “business customers” – affiliate partners? Currently, probably not. But it’s worth thinking about the longer term, too. Already, 61% of US shoppers begin their buying journey on Amazon regularly. That’s traffic which Amazon has to pay no extra commission on, and so it’s something that it would love to do more of.
Plus, of course, Amazon has hundreds of millions of reviews of its own that it could tap to automatically create recommendations for users, including by layering conversational AI on top of it to allow users to get “intelligent” recommendations. The potential is there for Amazon to be a trusted source of reviews, as well as the retailer of choice for online.
The “good” news is that presently, Amazon is struggling with its own grey goo of content in the form of fake reviews generated by AI. It’s responded with more AI to try to trim them out. But the key question is really what happens at the point it decides that the money it spends on delivering affiliate revenue would be better off spent on ads, or on-site AI, or whatever else.
Ironically, the kind of content mills which HouseFresh is railing against would be less bothered if Amazon does ever scale back on its focus on affiliates: they are, most likely, pretty aware that the brands they are using are near the end of their life, and if the affiliate cash cow moves on the private equity companies will have long since made a sizeable return.
The relationship between Amazon and publishers, like that of Google and publishers, is some kind of symbiosis. Amazon gains revenue from the clicks that publishers drive their way. Publishers get a slice of that money, enough for them to survive and grow. But the key question is whether that symbiosis is obligate – where each depends on the other for survival – or facultative, where each benefits but could survive alone. If it’s the former, affiliate content has a long and profitable future. If it’s the latter, then eventually, publishers who go all-in on it may have a problem.
