Journalism has always turned to its readership for content: letters to the editor, caption contests. This indeed benefited civil discourse and built a community out of a readership, but the practice, as with all things media, was made to benefit the paper’s bottom line. Building a community around a brand keeps users invested, and there is no greater community than the open forum that reader-generated content conjures.
Affiliate marketing publications have complicated this genre and made its mercenary underpinnings more clear. G/O Media’s The Inventory has Co-op, a collection of columns featuring the best products “according to… readers.” Here, writers for The Inventory anthologize the comments section of recent articles and present these reader-generated reviews to their audience.
For example, The Inventory published What’s the Best Projector for Your Home Entertainment Needs? on February 23rd. On February 26th, they published The Best Projectors, According To Our Readers, which included user ItsDeke’s review of an Epson projector, reprinted from ItsDeke’s comment on the February 23rd article.
Certainly, this creates community engagement that will keep readers hooked on products and The Inventory. By continuing to consume, and continuing to post their thoughts on The Inventory, they have the chance of seeing their name in print. The same reward mechanisms that made letters to the editor more than a forum for ideas but a fiscally prudent maneuver exists here.
But, the new economic reality of affiliate marketing arms creates a another revenue stream from this reader-created content. As I’ve discussed before, affiliate marketers recommend products to their readers. If this coverage sways the reader to purchase the product, and if they visit the company’s web store using the tracking link featured in the article, company will track this and will reward the affiliate marketer with a commission for securing the sale. As such, it’s not the community generated by these reviews that pays the affiliate marketer, but the review itself. They haven’t promoted ItsDeke’s comment to an article solely out of appreciation for his ideas, but because it now lets them add an affiliate tag to ItsDeke’s review, so that if anyone buys the Epson projector in question, The Inventory makes money.
Community content and its monetization has stoked (rightfully, in my mind) controversy of late. Buzzfeed hosts quizzes written by their users, and by 2017 user-generated content had received 100 million views, views which generated ad revenue for Buzzfeed without them paying out any wages. This doesn’t differ too much from letters to the editor. Readers bought the newspaper in part to read letters that the newspaper didn’t pay for. The only difference may be its quantifiability: while the newspapers of yore could not determine how many readers bought a paper to peruse editorial by readers, we know with precision how much revenue unpaid writers generated for Buzzfeed. In fact, according to Buzzfeed, the second highest driver of traffic for the website was a single college student, Rachel McMahon, who had created 700 Buzzfeed quizes. Like with letters to the editor, she had done this because she liked Buzzfeed’s aesthetic, and she wanted to impress her friends and strangers online. Buzzfeed made 300 million dollars in 2019. They paid McMahon in swag, but only after a disgruntled employee leaked how much McMahon had contributed to the sites success. She got a mug, a water bottle, a recipe book. Buzzfeed staff writers laid-off prior to the website’s unionization said that free content from people like McMahon had convinced management that paying Buzzfeed writers to create quizzes and viral content was not fiscally sensible. And Buzzfeed, knowing the talent they could harvest for free, did everything to make their most productive unpaid artists produce more quizzes. McMahon noted that Buzzfeed would often present fun “quiz-making challenges” in hopes of motivating their best unpaid writers to generate more quizzes, to raise more revenue for free.
The Inventory’s Co-op lacks the drama of Buzzfeed’s story. There is no co-ed single-handedly powering the biggest name in Internet virality. But it’s the same story. Co-op harnesses unpaid labor, but rather than using clicks and ads as a revenue stream, ItsDeke’s recommendation, should it prove successful, quite literally pays The Inventory. Underneath ItsDeke’s review of Epson, there’s a little blue button that leads to Amazon, and if you click that button and subsequently purchase a projector then The Inventory, G/O Media, and its holding group Great Hill Partners will profit.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing’s standard rate is 4%. For everyone who finds ItsDeke convincing and buys an Epson Home Cinema, The Inventory will receive $56 dollars. Like McMahon, ItsDeke will see none of those profits.
Of course, this has always been our arrangement with capital: great things come when the technology and clout of a brand unites with labor. But it is the always the former which appreciates those borne fruits. It is unlikely that ItsDeke or McMahon could have reached the wide audience that they did without the help of Buzzfeed’s and The Inventory’s platforms, and some apologists for the rich would say that due to the brand’s necessary contribution to this outcome of widespread readership, they own the positive outcomes.
Even if we were to believe this, one must admit it creates a perverse incentive as to who capital decides to pay. People are getting paid, its just not ItsDeke and McMahon. Someone had to concoct the community challenges that coaxed McMahon into producing 600 quizes, and someone at The Inventory had to aggregate reader comments into actionable affiliate marketing links. When you live in a world where people can be convinced to work for free, the people who capital pays are whoever is best at getting people to work for them. It’s the Tom Sawyer economy: quiz writers aren’t paid, but quiz writer wranglers who can woo free quizzes out of the community do. The labor that capital values is not the most talented labor, not even the most meritocratic labor to use the parlance of our neoliberal era, but those laborers most adept at seducing and negging free work out of others. The calculus is simple: would you rather pay someone $50 to produce great content, or pay someone $20 to convince that first person to give it to you for free?
What and how an affiliate marketer sees — it’s been on my mind lately. And the reason for this obsession, I have discovered today, is that they see most like capitalism, and in them we see media most inflected by our society’s incentives. In directors, they see merchandising opportunities. In product rankings, they promote based on profits rather than quality of products. In celebrity, they see the power of clout to guide people, and they fail to see how marketplaces do not try to serve the public equitably. But, its how they see their readership that is most revealing. Their readers are the consumers, but also the unpaid labor. I joked that the American habit of working in a coffee shops makes us the first generation to work and consume at the same time, but at least in those cases we get a little wage for our labor. Now, on The Inventory, with great pleasure, we can labor and purchase unfettered by wages.