For the past eight-ish years, I’ve taken a hard stance against affiliate links in Advisorator.

Affiliate links allow writers, YouTubers, and other content creators to earn sales commissions from the products and services they cover. If a website posts about deal on a portable charger, for instance, an affiliate link provides that site with a cut of any resulting sales.

I’ve resisted putting affiliate links in Advisorator because I’m wary of how it can warp incentives. Too often, I’ll see websites push mediocre products or dubious deals just for the sake of a sales commission, or I’ll wonder if a YouTuber’s glowing product review was motivated more by affiliate revenue than the product’s actual merits. Folks who support Advisorator with paid subscriptions deserve not to worry about biased recommendations.

That said, I’m now rethinking my approach to affiliate links for a few reasons:

• More than 8,500 people now read Advisorator’s free edition, and it’d be nice to get support from those who don’t become paid subscribers.
• Earnings from affiliate fees would allow me to grow the newsletter and spend more time working on it.
• I think there’s a way for me to do affiliate links that doesn’t feel like a huge moral compromise.

Basically, I’m envisioning an approach similar to what I’ve been doing in Cord Cutter Weekly over the past year: I’ll only include affiliate links in the deals section (“Spend Wisely”) toward the end of the newsletter, with a prominent disclosure at the top of the section:

“This part of the newsletter has some affiliate links, which earn me a commission if you wind up buying or subscribing to something.“

Linking to good deals is the entire point of the Spend Wisely section, so having affiliate links shouldn’t change my approach. Just like with Cord Cutter Weekly, I’ll continue to recommend the best deals I can find each week, regardless of whether there’s a sales commission attached. And by limiting affiliate links to this one section, I’ll avoid the urge to tailor more of the newsletter toward selling you stuff.

My plan is to do this for both the free and paid versions of Advisorator. While I could potentially exclude affiliate links from the paid version, that would create extra work without changing any actual content, since the deal list would be the same in both newsletters.

To be clear, I will not include affiliate links in the Deal Alerts that I occasionally send to paid subscribers. Inevitably that would incentivize me to send more emails, and that’s exactly the kind of editorial compromise I’m trying to avoid.

Also: I’m still not doing ads or sponsorships in Advisorator. Figuring out how to get people to click on ads isn’t fun, the potential for conflicts of interest is too high, and I’d rather spend that time and energy on other things.

Unless there’s a strong objection from paid subscribers, I’ll likely start setting up affiliate links within the next few weeks, with clear disclosure and a link back to this post. If you have any feedback in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to send me an email or post your thoughts in the Tech Buds forum.

Thanks again for your support.