Wirecutter (website)


Wirecutter is a product review website owned by The New York Times Company. It was founded by Brian Lam in 2011 and purchased by The New York Times Company in 2016 for about $30 million. In the five years from its launch in 2011 to 2016, the company generated $150 million in revenue from affiliate programs with its merchant partners. As of 2018, it had more than 100 employees.
The site focuses on writing detailed guides to different categories of consumer products which recommend just one or two best items in the category. It gains the vast majority of its revenue from affiliate commissions. To prevent bias, the staff who write its reviews are not informed about what commissions, if any, the site receives for different products. Due to affiliate revenue, the site is less reliant than other blogs and news sites on advertising revenue, although the Wirecutter site has displayed banner ads in the past.
For several years, it had a sibling site called The Sweethome which focused on home goods while The Wirecutter itself focused on electronics and tools, but the two have been combined into a single site. Wirecutter has partnered with other websites including Engadget to provide guest posts sponsored by the company. In 2015, Amazon tested a partnership with Wirecutter on a similar sponsored posts format on Amazon's site for recommendations.
Wirecutter has been described as a competitor to Consumer Reports, from which it differs by its explicit recommendations of top picks, a younger readership, and its acceptance of vendor-supplied test units. While Wirecutter does perform their own testing of products, they also draw on and cite other reviews by sites like Consumer Reports, Reviewed, CNET, and America's Test Kitchen, often using those reviews to filter a large range of products on the market down to a small number of candidates for testing.