On Independence

It has never been more difficult to find accurate information about product quality online. A few researchers have explored why that is.

Start with search. Glen Allsopp is an SEO researcher who spent years mapping who actually owns the first page of Google’s search results. His findings were shocking. In his most recent analysis, he found 16 media companies (operating over 580 brands between them) ranking on the first page for 85% of the 10,000 affiliate-heavy searches he tracked. When a content site held the #1 result for a specific product search, it belonged to one of those 16 conglomerates 86% of the time. Collectively, they receive an estimated 3.5 billion clicks from Google a month.

For the media companies listed above, their ranking on Google is their competitive moat. The “reviews” that you see these companies and their subsidiaries publish are now their core commercial operation.

In a 2023 Digiday & Impact.com survey, 81% of publishers said commerce content plays an important role in their media portfolio. 29% said they churn out 26 or more new commerce pieces a month (more than one every business day), with another 14% publishing at least 16.

Nobody is actually testing products at that pace. There are so many egregious examples of this. For instance, Money.com, a personal finance website, inexplicably publishes buying recommendations for paint sprayers, garage door openers, air purifiers and various other household goods.

At the same time, HouseFresh, an independent outfit that buys and lab-tests every air purifier it covers, watched its Google traffic fall from 4,000 readers a day to 200 after a 2024 algorithm update. A 95% collapse, despite doing the real testing that all the others skip.

The mechanism driving all of this is the affiliate link: a tracking URL that pays the site a commission whenever a reader clicks through and buys. US advertisers passed $10 billion in affiliate marketing spend in 2024, on a forecast track to nearly $16 billion by 2028.

The outcome of this new incentive for publishers is obvious: recommend as many products in as many categories as possible, and collect a commission on every sale that clicks through.

Real product testing is expensive. Instead, volume is now the business. That is how a personal-finance site ends up ranking for paint sprayers and why the "best" lists you read always name ten products instead of one.

Affiliate practices are rarely disclosed too. When Princeton researchers analyzed affiliate content across 500,000 YouTube videos and 2.1 million Pinterest pins, only around one in ten affiliate posts carried any disclosure at all.

The last bastion of truth was supposed to be anecdotal reviews from individual purchasers online, but even those are now compromised. The Transparency Company ran 73 million reviews through fraud detection and flagged nearly 14% as likely fake, estimating the damage at $300 billion a year, or about $2,385 per US household.

Tripadvisor's own transparency report admits that 4.4% of the 30 million reviews submitted in a year are fraudulent. That’s especially notable since Tripadvisor is grading its own efficacy. The FTC considered all of this serious enough to ban fake reviews outright in October 2024.

The problem is caused by perverse incentives.

A recommendation system that pays the recommender will drift toward whatever pays best. Once the tracking link arrived, the drift was inevitable. The “best” product in any given review turned into the best-paying. The reviewer’s customer moved from the reader to the advertiser.

The information ecosystem that surrounds consumer products has been eroded by the same mechanisms that eroded the products themselves. The incentive moved from serving the buyer to extracting from the buyer.

Outside of regulation, there is only one way I see to fix the information ecosystem: publications must commit to a new, entirely resilient incentive structure. They must establish rules that make capture impossible and write them down in public, in such a way that breaking them would cost the publication immediate trust.

So Worse on Purpose is going first. What follows are the rules this publication will run on for as long as it exists, written in public, for readers to enforce.

Worse on Purpose exists to be the most accurate, up-to-date and readable source on consumer product quality on the internet.

Three core goals follow from that:

Document the decline. When a great product gets hollowed out, prove it. Show who bought the brand, what changed, when, and who profited.

Map what's still built right. Tell the stories of brands that still prioritize their customers over shareholders and deserve your money.

Answer to readers alone. No outside influence. Accurate information survives only where nobody can pay to influence it.

Every policy below exists to protect these three core goals. These are the rules I can be held to.

Worse on Purpose will never accept money from a brand. Not advertising, not sponsorships, not "partnerships," not paid placements, not press trips. The only way for a publication to avoid any ulterior motives when promoting brands is to commit to never benefiting financially from any promotion. So that is what we’re doing.

The Ledger is not for sale. No brand can pay to get on The Brand Ledger, off it, up it, or down it. No Approved brand has ever paid me a cent, and none ever will. The ledger is also not a blacklist. Every entry carries a last-reviewed date, statuses move in both directions, and a brand that earns its way back up gets written back up.

There are no affiliate links here. The moment a recommendation pays the recommender, it stops being a recommendation. It is just an ad. Any links you see to brand or product pages, in the ledger or newsletter, will in no way benefit me if you purchase through them.

Nothing I cover arrives free. Whenever I test products directly, they get bought at retail, with my own money, the way any consumer would buy them. If I have not tested them directly, you will know. If a brand ships me something unsolicited, it gets returned or donated.

And there are no investors. I have spent every essay in this archive documenting what happens to good things when outside capital buys in. I will not be running that experiment on this one. There will never be assets to sell. Worse on Purpose dies the moment I stop personally publishing it.

The work is built on the documented record: SEC filings, court dockets, import and customs data, FDA complaint databases, earnings calls, patent filings. Sources are linked to every claim so you can check me.

I don't do access journalism. I don't ask brands for comment before publishing, I don't take briefings, and I don't attend junkets. There is nothing a company can withhold to obstruct this newsletter, because I have never needed anything from them except their public paper trail.

If a brand (or anyone, really) responds to something I've published with substantive counter-evidence, I'll engage with it seriously and append it to the piece.

The other place the work comes from is you. The best leads so far have arrived in the inbox from readers who watched a product they loved quietly fall apart. If that's you, write to [email protected].

Worse on Purpose has no staff, and it never will.

Every rule in this policy is about financial incentives that could affect the integrity of the work. A payroll is another form of financial incentive. Yes, employees provide leverage, but that works both ways. Every employee is a real obligation. They are a person you owe, whose rent depends on your revenue. When money gets tight (and money always gets tight) that duty will affect editorial decision-making.

The brand sponsorship deal stops looking like a compromise of values and starts looking like responsibility to your people. The affiliate deal becomes how you make payroll. It may be a more understandable way for a publication to be captured by incentives, but it is capture nonetheless.

Alone, the worst case is that I go unpaid for a few months to protect the integrity of this publication. That's a trade I can make without asking anyone's permission, and one I could never impose on a staff. Because of that, there is no staff.

The catch with working alone is of course the workload, which brings us to the machines.

I use AI in this work. Readers should know exactly where.

One person publishes this newsletter, and its ambitions are lofty: the most accurate, most rigorously fact-checked, most readable reporting on product quality anywhere on the internet. That standard used to take a team of editors, researchers and fact-checkers. With machine intelligence, that is no longer the case.

I use AI to sweep ground no individual could cover alone. Thousands of pages of SEC filings, import manifests, court dockets, patents, decades of forum archives etc...

I also use it in editing in the same way I’d use an intelligent thought-partner. I consult with it about structure, framing and whether there might be a better, more precise way to make a particular point.

I never generate any writing end-to-end with AI. Any time I use AI through the editing process it is to improve the comprehensibility of my original drafts.

Every claim, in every essay, gets verified by me against the primary source before it ships.

The verdicts are mine. The writing is mine. And the mistakes are mine too.

You can always reach me directly via email if you want to talk directly to the human behind the project. I read everything and do my best to reply.

A one-person operation working at this scope will make mistakes. Any material errors I make get corrected in the piece itself (whether in The Ledger, or in an investigation), with a dated note. Readers are my best auditors. If you do see any errors, please let me know.

If you read back through this policy you’ll notice it is essentially a list of money refused. The ads, the sponsorships, the affiliate commissions, the investor's check, and so on...

Rules like that can only hold if an alternative source of revenue can be found.

This work has costs: products bought at retail, records and database fees, the hosting bill behind a few million ledger requests a day, and of course, my livelihood.

The only alternative revenue source that won’t affect the integrity of the work is readers themselves.

So that is the business model. Readers fund the work, and the work stays free. The weekly essays and the Brand Ledger are free for everyone, because if this work matters, it has to reach the person googling "why did my boots fall apart" at midnight, not just the people who pay. There should be no paywall on facts.

When you buy a Worse on Purpose membership, you are funding editorial independence.

The perks below exist as a thank you. The true value is in funding a publication that can investigate any brand, publish any verdict, and correct any mistake, because the only people it answers to are the people it serves.

The community. The place where readers compare notes on what's still built right, what quietly broke, and what's held up after a decade. These are the notes that feed the ledger and steer the next investigation. It currently lives behind the membership paywall because I'm only one person, and an open community like this would be a recipe for astroturfing. A paid door is our best moderation tool, at least for now.

A member-only investigation, every month. One extra investigation each month, exclusively for members, and members vote on which brand or category gets it.

Votes that set the roadmap. Members vote in the community on what gets investigated next. The research agenda gets decided by the people who fund the work.

A priority inbox. Members' replies land in a priority inbox I can actually clear. You will not disappear into the pile.

And more is coming: member-only features for the Brand Ledger are on the roadmap.

Founding membership is $7 a month or $70 a year, locked for life. On September 1 the price goes to $10 and $100 for new members. Founding members keep their rate forever.

Click the button below to join ↓

If subscriptions aren’t your thing, but you want to support the work, you can always make a one-time donation.

We’ll be back to our usual investigative programming next week.

With gratitude,
Keyana