Zero Clicks #10: Et tu, Wirecutter?

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

We have even more proof that even the highest quality content isn’t immune to Google’s Zero Clicks ambitions. Even Wirecutter is losing real estate on the SERP to direct listings on marketplaces and an uncontextualized morass of product grids.

Let me be unambiguous about where I stand on this. While the brand has somewhat overextended itself in pursuit of scale, Wirecutter is the gold standard of product reviews on the internet. If Google’s updates are truly docking Wirecutter’s traffic by 33%, there’s no better proof that its updates are fundamentally flawed.

But the die has been cast. Google is drawing a permanent line in the sand against publisher middlemen, and especially against entities that rely on affiliate marketing for monetization. This raises an interesting question for the New York Times corporate strategy team: how do they get the most value out of Wirecutter? Should they continue to try and monetize as a profitable business unit in and of itself? Or should they eschew short-term monetization to try and drive additional traffic and brand visibility, even if that means dialing down affiliate?

Taking a page from Amazon’s playbook, the Times does a great job of obfuscating Wirecutter’s revenue by burying it in the “other” line item which includes affiliate, licensing, and books, film, and TV revenues unrelated to commerce. This business unit generated $66.9M in Q2 of 2024, with “higher Wirecutter affiliate referral and licensing revenues” cited as a boon to the bottom line.

So why should the Times consider scaling back on affiliate as a business model?

Ultimately, Wirecutter’s strategic value to the New York Times is orders of magnitude larger than the revenue that it generates. The New York Times’ grand strategy is essentially selling a self-actualization and lifestyle bundle to yuppies and left-leaning boomers… and Wirecutter is an essential linchpin in that strategy. The $30M that the Times paid for Wirecutter in 2016 was highway robbery, second only to Wordle as the savviest M&A of the entire decade.

The New York Times is the greatest success story in modern media because it managed to make publishing expensive journalism a side hustle to helping their customers eat, shop, and play, effectively recapturing the business model magic that classifieds provided to 20th-century newspapers.

For more than a decade, Wirecutter has done an exceptional job walking the tightrope of building a highly profitable affiliate business while keeping its guides editorially sacrosanct. Yet, almost weekly I get questions from marketing leaders– often at the top levels of organizations– asking how they can buy or bully their way into a favorable Wirecutter review. When I respond that they can’t, I’m met with polite skepticism at best.

CMOs raised in an era of buying more Google and Meta ads may be a uniquely cynical lot, but there’s an interesting lesson here. No matter how elegantly you disclose affiliate relationships and explain editorial independence, some amount of consumer trust is always going to be eroded by the presence of affiliate links. When the Google spigot was spewing traffic to affiliate websites, the revenue generated more than offset the brand reputation risk. Now, the equation is less clear.

While most companies don’t have a super-bundle like the Times, the highest-trafficked product review sites are owned by complex media orgs and/or private equity giants that have their hand in a vast array of businesses. Whereas commerce may have once been viewed as a siloed, incremental cash generator for large media organizations, it's now only as valuable as the bundles it helps them create.

This is the paradox that Google’s quest for Zero Clicks has created. Commerce media as a source of standalone, predictable, recurring revenue looks like a worse business than ever. But in an era of skyrocketing customer acquisition costs, high-quality product or service journalism in support of a broader business has more strategic enterprise value than ever before.

This week we’re featuring three jobs from TikTok as a lens into where the company is focused on driving growth. Most interesting is that TikTok is now actively staffing up to build a proper retail media platform.

Go To Market Lead, Shop Ads, TikTok

At the grand strategy level, TikTok is trying to balance being an ads-based media platform and a shopping marketplace. Now it has the added wrinkle of also trying to build an ads platform within a shopping marketplace. It’s an obvious play and one that will be highly lucrative in the short run. But at some level, it feels like TikTok is speedrunning the path to enshittification– within months, there will be ads in your feed and ads in your shop tab. It took Google and Amazon decades to get this ad happy– TikTok will get there in just five.

Vertical Director, CPG Food & Bev, TikTok

More than any vertical, TikTok has billions of dollars to chase in food and beverage. Any given Sunday, you can see how much money Frito-Lay and Budweiser still spend on TV ads. And while no category is immune to the Meta/Google monster, TikTok sets up as a better replacement for TV dollars in the food and beverage vertical than conventional performance marketing. If I was a financial advisor or beachside real estate agent, I’d be stalking the heck out of this team on LinkedIn.

Growth Marketing Manager, Open Loop Commerce, TikTok

One of the telltale signs that a company is becoming an absolute behemoth is when they start hiring B2B marketers to help grow specific esoteric features within their products. As far as career accelerants go, though, you could certainly do worse than working on growth marketing within the fastest-growing growth marketing engine for brands.