What Happened to Wirecutter⁠↗

Wirecutter helped popularize a genre of lucrative recommendation content—where the site gets a cut of every purchase you make after you click on “affiliate” links to Amazon or other partner sites—and spawned a series of copycats. If you’ve ever searched online for the “best” anything, there’s a good chance that Wirecutter’s DNA was in almost every single article you found.

The site has to be comprehensive and cater to the preferences of mercurial readers. And, for reasons big and small, that seems to have become an impossible task on today’s internet.

The testing processes and articles, some people argue, seem less exhaustive; others contend that the recommended products are of a lower quality in recent years. Many point out a specific moment when things changed, as Casabona did in his tweet: in 2016, when The New York Times acquired the site for more than $30 million. But it’s not quite evidence; it’s a gut feeling, a vibe.

Rather than evoke trustworthiness through sleek design, Wirecutter gleefully asserts it through its prose. The reviews can take the tone of an eccentric writing a letter to a dear friend. “It’s about understanding things on a deeper level and then using that to help people not feel so annoyed or stressed about getting or using the things they need,” Brian Lam, the site’s founder, told me. “Your pain as a reviewer translates into another person not having that pain.” When a particular product category was bad, the site refused to write about it or would explicitly tell readers to stay away. Lam was especially fond of reviews that employed a lateral mode of thinking—What’s the Best Cat? Well, Have You Considered a Dog?—and argued that this early approach set the site apart from other reviewers.

Wirecutter paid freelancers hourly, often spending thousands of dollars on sprawling features that generated money through the site’s affiliate-link model—commonplace now, but a drastic departure from the banner advertising that was standard at the time. With this model, Wirecutter exploded and expanded, adding a companion site, The Sweethome, in 2013, which focused on home and lifestyle.

By 2015, the Wirecutter brand was popular and lucrative enough—in four years, it had generated a reported $150 million in online transactions—that potential buyers came calling. In 2016, the site sold to the Times, as a service-y complement to the newspaper’s own journalism. It didn’t take long for Wirecutter staffers to realize that the Times’ ambitions for the site far exceeded Wirecutter’s own expectations of moderate, steady growth. According to multiple former employees, whom I am keeping anonymous because they still work in the industry, the Times’ leadership wanted the site to double the amount of content it produced in order to juice revenue. Those employees said Wirecutter’s top editors argued that the site’s business would not scale directly, because a minority of articles, many of them for big-ticket items such as appliances, generated the bulk of the company’s revenues. But the mandate remained: Wirecutter would need to double its staff and double its output.

But growth brought with it other adjustments. Times management also adjusted the freelance pay structure from an hourly rate to a flat fee per article, which two former staffers argue likely contributed to less time spent on researching and writing product recommendations. Frumin strongly rejected the notion that the flat-fee pay structure has contributed to a decline in quality and argued that the site now relies less on freelance labor, opting to hire more paid staffers for this very reason.

That’s because although Wirecutter changed, everything else did too: The internet of 2023 is not the internet of 2011, nor are the products, nor are the consumers.

On top of all that, the web has evolved, in part because of Wirecutter’s success: Competing sites such as New York’s The Strategist and scores of other, less reliable knockoffs have emerged. Frumin himself told me that “the internet is so awash with reviews now that it can make the genre feel like a commodity.” Wirecutter readers started using the site differently too; die-hard users like Casabona said they trusted the site so much that they stopped reading the reviews and merely clicked the top links, ignoring some of the painstaking caveats that might dissuade a person from buying a product.

Multiple former Wirecutter employees told me that they see a broad shift, with people migrating to trust influencers and people they know (or feel that they know) over institutions. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have become reliable destinations for product reviews in video formats, which appeal to younger generations of consumers.

Ultimately, Wirecutter’s mission to “tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment” has become a herculean, if not impossible, task; the internet is too big, and it’s filled with too much stuff. And, as many online shoppers learned during the height of the pandemic, purchases don’t always follow the cold, rational logic of a Wirecutter recommendation. We panic-buy; we impulse-buy; we buy to fill a hole in our lives. “The ideal review is that you test everything and then there’s one product that works well for most people,” a former Wirecutter editor, who asked to speak anonymously because they still work in media, told me. “But who is ‘most people’?”

Today, defining most people is an existential question for recommendation sites like Wirecutter, which does not ruthlessly harvest user data or offer targeted personal recommendations the way larger retailers such as Amazon do. It’s unclear what role a site like Wirecutter might play in one possible version of the future internet, where generative-AI assistants sift through information from recommendation sites and tailor them to their user’s detailed interests.

Wirecutter’s trajectory is the story of what the internet does to most great ideas: It forces them to scale, and then others replicate the concepts at varying levels of quality until, eventually, an economic, algorithmic wildfire is burning. The original is consumed and left in a scarred landscape. Has Wirecutter become less reliable? Or did the world and everyone around it change? Is there a place on an ever more commercialized web for long, obsessive letters from an anti-consumerist, gadget-loving friend? Or is the craft and care of the meticulous product review now a digital antique? The answer, like any good Wirecutter review, is full of contradictions: Yes.