HN user
I saw an Outbound in the early 90s if my memory is right. Their use of the tiny bar as mouse replacement looked really cool. Kinda want to play around with that as an input device.
To be clear, this is about affiliate advertising, which Wirecutter absolutely uses today. That’s what ‘kickbacks’ refers to.
First, as others have noted, this article is a decade old.
Second, That doesn’t matter because the wider context is affiliate advertising. Brian Lam, then editor of Wirecutter, emailed xdesk asking them to work out an affiliate advertising relationship - something that Amazon had been using to great success by 2012. It’s a bit disingenuous of xdesk to claim they didn’t understand the request.
This isn’t news in 2023, and it was barely news in 2012 - xdesk clearly was spinning the narrative in their favor. Affiliate advertising works, Wirecutter has _always_ made it clear that is their business model - I’ve been following them since Brian Lam moved from Gizmodo - and this has always felt like sour grapes to me. Essentially, Wirecutter found a cheaper desk 95% as good as the xdesk product, and recommended that. That is how Wirecutter works today and how it worked back then.