Note: the words pocket pussy will be included in this essay because I am going to be talking about the economic incentives of sex toy advertisers and affiliate marketers. I will use this phrase four times. If you do not want to read about sex toys, for example, if sex is triggering for you or if you are my mother, a frequent reader of this blog, well, here’s a disclaimer.
As a once shopping junky, I’ve read a lot of affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketers provide readers with reviews and deal round-ups, with the somewhat nefarious complication that most of their deal round-ups reflect an oft-underplayed advertising arrangement with vendors, with the marketer making money when a reader purchases a product after clicking on an inline link.
This arrangement leads to hyperbolic discourse. For affiliate marketers, everything is simply the best.
Taken from the splash page of The Inventory, G/O Media’s affiliate marketing arm, the above highlights the giddy that affiliate marketers must feel, are paid to feel, for products. When the marketer only makes money if an article directly leads to a purchase, coverage must glow. The products can only be the best.
But the “Best” for an affiliate marketing arm need not be the best for the consumer, and a number of behind-the-scenes factors go into what is included and excluded from a round-up, what gets to be the best. While affiliate marketers adore products, the type of products worthy of adoration depends upon who has decided to partner with their marketing program. There’s also, at least, some amount of journalistic integrity that dictates the sort of products that end up on the front page. If The Inventory only ever advertised duds, then people would stop reading, and no companies would contract with them. These competing concerns, the need to sell what has been sponsored and the need to remain objective in reputation, dictates what an affiliate marketer sees as the best.
The sex toy piece above, The Best Sex Toy for Everyone, No Matter Your Preferred Style of Pleasure, I think shows off well these competing concerns.
Journalistic integrity and the word “Best” is somewhat at odds: journalism loves to hedge itself with confounding and vague language, e.g. “racially charged,” “shot in an officer involved incident,” “one of the most recognizable arches in Saint Louis.” Most of the time, in order to justify using the superlative, The Inventory makes “Best” a conditional affair. Above, The Inventory could not claim that they have found the universal best sex toy, one so good as to handle the entire diversity of bodies and pleasures, but it can claim that it has found the best for each pleasure style. The affiliate marketing genre then must excel in divvying up the world into certain types of people, be it based on their budgets or pleasure styles. It’s one of the reasons Buzzfeed, Internet’s king of partitioning readers into different personalities, is considered one of the great pros of affiliate marketing.
These partitions, in my mind, give the marketer some plausible deniability: since they always define their genres vaguely, rarely putting exact dollars on budgets or giving the reader some way to definitively identify their pleasure style, the results in my mind are not falsifiable. In the above example, I see minimal attempts to link up the given product with either predefined pleasure styles or with styles rigorously defined by The Inventory. Instead, it’s a list of products that do associate with a considerable number of pleasure styles, but which lack any guide to help a reader identify which product best suits them.
But the claim that they’ve found the best for “any” pleasure style, that they can write an encyclopedia of desire, gets confounded by the fact that the article does not consider a number of common pleasure styles. While I do appreciate that it includes prostate massagers and nipple vacuums, and that it makes sure to highlight items that both same-sex and heterosexual couples of many body types can enjoy, it doesn’t have anything in the way of even the most socially-accepted kinks: nothing foot-related, nothing for sadomasochism. It doesn’t even include a pocket pussy, or anything else that someone whose pleasure style involves simple thrusting might enjoy. Even if we trust that The Inventory knows and recommends superlative products, we have a whole range of pleasure styles simply left out.
Since some of these exclusions are rather glaring, I warrant that The Inventory has not left them out due to some form of bigotry, but due to the implicit filter, rarely considered, that screens out any products that The Inventory lacks an affiliate marketing contract for. The Inventory needs to have a pre-existing agreement with the product’s company in order to make money. They cannot recommend just any product and then ask the company to cough up a buck. And while Amazon’s affiliate marketing program allows The Inventory to recommend virtually any product and receive a 10% commission from the Seattle superstore, anything unavailable on Amazon would require a separate contract. Lelo, which sponsored The Inventory’s recent “Self Love Week”, does not sell on Amazon. Therefore, if Lelo really presents the best vibrator, as The Inventory avers, The Inventory would have to work with Lelo’s marketing team to identify what kind of commission G/O Media could expect from them should a reader purchase a Lelo toy via an affiliate link. If Lelo had rejected such an agreement, they would not have appeared in this article. One can of course imagine that there could easily be a sex toy better than Lelo neither offered through Amazon nor willing to provide comissions to G/O Media. Possibly, something similar happened with all the pocket pussy and foot fetish companies: they weren’t screened out due to lack of consumer demand, but due to lack of interest from pocket pussy producers.
(This isn’t even to note another complication rarely discussed: if two similar products provide different sized commissions—maybe one agrees to 12% and another to 15%—I doubt this wouldn’t affect what gets included and excluded in a round-up. The editorial independence statement says otherwise, that independence from the advertising arm of G/O Media is key. That’s why this accusation of mine, that the relative value of each affiliate marketing contract must inform the decision making of The Inventory editors, is couched in parentheses: it is speculation on my part at odds with what The Inventory states to be true. But, I want us to get real. Even in traditional and high-minded journalism, journalists are hired and fired based on the number of people who click on their article and receive bonuses based on good web traffic (a model, by the way, pioneered by G/O Media’s predecessor Gizmodo Media Group). This is because G/O Media employs its journalists and affiliate marketers to make their parent company money. That’s for which, after all, all employers employ us. Then, if an affiliate marketer is paid to make their company the most money, and one vibrator gives a 15% commission whereas the other vibrator gives a 12% commission, and they live in a mercenary industry where commission money can be directly tracked and their coworkers live and die by clicks and ad revenue, I wager that the 15% commission would be deemed “the best” vibrator. Once more, I stress that G/O Media would refute these allegations. To which I say: if G/O Media truly lived by its journalistic standards and refused to have sponsored content, how come Lelo sex tech hosted an entire self-love week with G/O Media? Are you to tell me that a commission driven industry just so happened to neutrally select a specific sex tech company to feature in five different articles in February 2021? If Lelo did not give direct monetary sponsorship for this content, I have to believe that they gave a beefy commission to have such plush screen real estate on The Inventory’s website. And if no such beefy commission occurred, well, I hope that the shareholders of Great Hill Partners—the holding company that owns G/O Media—sue its executives for all they own for creating an affiliate marketing arm willing to relinquish precious page space to a profitless excursion like self-love.
Or, curtly: affiliate marketing is a business in a bottom-line driven world. All actions either have a ruthless and profitable reason, or the shareholders get to sue, ergo all actions have a ruthless and proftiable reason. Ergo, commission contracts, unseen to the reader, must factor into the calculus of what is best.
So I must conclude this lengthy parenthetical of grounded accusations.)
Thus, the conditionality of “The Best” has a few layers to it. One needs to have a pleasure style that the writers at The Inventory can imagine and opine upon, surely, but “The Best” is really the best of the subset of products offered by our sponsors. And the criteria for greatness may correlate with consumer satisfaction, but I think it likely that it better correlates with the amount of money expected to exchange hands due to affiliate marketing.
Which is to say that while seeing like an affiliate marketer requires a pathological need to call everything “the best,” it also involves ignoring by its structure a vast set of products, and seeing products not simply as superlative remedies to modern life but as a way to get cash out of readers. “Seeing like an affiliate marketer” means two distinct things. There’s the way that the affiliate marketer would like their audience to see the world, and would like their audience to think that they see the world, one with products as a giddy focal point, one in which an unbiased and encyclopedic review of what’s out on the market can lead to a richer, more self-loving, world. And then there’s the way that, by the structure of their business, the affiliate marketer actually sees things, at once blind to a whole set of products and with an extrasensory perception that allows them to see not just how these products will benefit their reader’s lives, but how much cash they can expect from hawking it. It means seeing less, but also seeing differently.
Both these modes of vision instruct us about the modern world. The last times I brought up affiliate marketers, I said that their desire to catalogue the world in terms of products—Funko Pops substituting for directors, bad buys substituting for bad times—can provide great insight into our product-laden lives. But now I realize that takes the affiliate marketer at face value: the idea that we can see the world through an encyclopedic cornucopia of products, through the affiliate marketer’s home page, accepts the affiliate marketer as an objective cartographer of our product age rather than an institution on the side of the salesman, not the consumer.
Seeing what they see is doubly instructive: it teaches us about the products we buy, and it teaches us about the media environment we’ve created to sell them.
Here’s the Pokemon theme song because I don’t want to end on a dour note. I want to be the very best. :) :) :)