WIRED's Editorial Policy on Affiliate Links
WIRED posts links to products from online retailers we recommend independently. If you choose to click a link on our pages and then purchase a product on the retailers website, code in the link includes a signal for the retailer to send us a small percentage of the money spent. This is known as an affiliate commission. Our affiliate program functions independently of our editorial and newsgathering functions. Our staff does not cover products because they are available at a particular retailer.
Affiliate programs are common practice for online publishers and offer additional means to fund the excellent journalism you expect from WIRED. If you don't want us to receive a commission on your purchase, use your favorite search engine to find that product.
Why You Should Like and Trust Us
We are real people using real products in the real world. The WIRED Reviews team has been around since 2011. We have 15 full-time staffers spread across the United States and one in Scotland, with a century of professional reviewing and deal-hunting experience among us. When we recommend a product, it’s been life-tested, not just lab-tested.
We base our ratings on how a product performs in the field, with a focus on features that matter in real human scenarios. We give you product insights because we used them as you would. You, the reader, are getting much more than a spec sheet.
What Makes Us Unique
We bring authenticity to our product reviews. A lot of laboratory-style product testing doesn’t exactly replicate testing that you might find in your house. We have also tested many of these products in the same scenarios for extended periods of time, not just days or hours. We’ll never pick a product based on one number being bigger or smaller than another.
For example, do you care if a robot vacuum can clean two teaspoons of flour, or do you care if it gets stuck on your rug tassels or the Duplo bricks your toddler left on the floor? Is it more important to drop a bowling ball on a mattress and saw the mattress in half like they do in TV commercials, or is it more important to know how it feels after you’ve spent a week sleeping on it? Do you care how earbuds’ frequency response measures in a room lined with sound-dampening panels, or would you rather know how they sound on a busy New York subway?
How We Handle Our Business
We always share our real opinions. We do not compromise our standards for business partnerships or marketing purposes. We follow WIRED’s editorial standards, which guide some of the world’s most important reporting.
Like the vast majority of other product recommendation sites, we make money based on affiliate commissions in addition to ad revenue. We write about a product, you click our link to buy it, and we get a small share of the revenue from the sale.
Here’s the bottom line: We will not lie about products to sell them to you. We tell you what we like and what we don’t after testing it in our real lives. Our reviewers do not get bonuses or commissions for selling products they don’t like. Most of our business is conducted via large multi-brand retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and REI, where we get the same commission rate regardless of which product you choose to buy. You can trust what we recommend, because the product has served us well, and it will likely serve you well too.