Jared Newman

I’ve been thinking about shifting my stance on affiliate links in Cord Cutter Weekly, or rather, shifting it a little bit further.

Affiliate links are essentially kickbacks for content creators. When someone clicks a link to a product in an online article or YouTube video description, and that person then makes a purchase, the creator gets a commission, which is tracked through some code included in the link. For a lot of tech sites—including some where I freelance—affiliate commissions are an important revenue stream, especially as the bottom drops out on advertising.

I’ve always resisted putting affiliate links in my newsletters, despite plenty of folks telling me how much money I’m leaving on the table. While affiliate links make for an easy exchange of value between creators and audiences, they also risk becoming editorially corrosive.

Leading up to the Super Bowl, for instance, you’ll find countless “how to watch” articles pushing readers toward expensive live TV streaming services while omitting the free alternatives that don’t earn a commission. The Super Bowl is almost always available to stream for free—this year, it’s on Tubi—and you can also watch for free with an antenna, yet some sites only mention these options offhandedly or not at all. I get pretty heated about this sort of thing because it puts short-term financial gain ahead of readers’ interests.

Even so, I started rethinking affiliate links last year, after noticing a growing amount of Google search traffic leading to Cord Cutter Weekly’s big list of streaming deals page. I set up that page—and update it every Friday—as both a resource for newsletter readers and a way to bring in new subscribers. What I’ve found, though, is that only a tiny percentage of visitors sign up for Cord Cutter Weekly in the end.

So as an experiment, I began sticking affiliate links into the deal list where applicable. My thinking was that even if visitors don’t sign up for the newsletter, we’d still have a fair exchange of value for the time I put into maintaining the list. My editorial approach hasn’t changed either. It’s just a list of every streaming deal that I can find, delivered in plain bullet points, with little room to steer people toward unnecessary expenses. (In theory, I could shuffle things around to emphasize the deals with the biggest commissions, but I don’t.)

To date I have not added any affiliate links to the newsletter proper, figuring that some value is already exchanged when people give me their email address. While I don’t run ads in the newsletter or sell readers’ information, every new reader has the potential to purchase my Complete Guide to Cord Cutting or become a paid subscriber to my Advisorator newsletter.

Still, I’ve started wondering if a similar approach to affiliate links would be reasonable inside the actual newsletter, which includes a more curated list of deals in its bottom section. Using affiliate links for those deals would take little extra effort and wouldn’t require any changes to the actual content.

But in doing so, I’d be disregarding everything I just wrote about the value exchange of getting someone’s email address. I’d also become more susceptible to editorial corrosion, for instance by focusing more on deals that would earn me a commission.

I don’t have answers to those dilemmas, except to point out that the longer I’m in this business, the more independence I want. Advisorator subscriptions are my largest single source of income now, but the majority still comes from freelance work, which doesn’t connect me directly to readers and (now more than ever) feels like it could disappear at any moment. Opening another revenue stream could tilt the balance toward my own publications while providing an actual ad budget to bring in new readers. I have a huge list of things I’d love to do with Cord Cutter Weekly and Advisorator if only time permitted, and maybe this provides a clearer path to realizing them.

At the moment I haven’t made any decisions. But I needed a place to get these thoughts down and share them with anyone who might care.