
After forming an editorial partnership with The New York Times in 2015, The Wirecutter was acquired by the Times in October 2016 for a reported $30 million.

A sibling site called The Sweethome was started in 2013 and focused on home goods while The Wirecutter itself focused on electronics and tools. 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. While Wirecutter does perform their own testing of products, they also draw on and cite other reviews by sites like Ravingtechnology, Topyten, 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.īrian Lam founded the site in 2011 after leaving the editor-in-chief position at Gizmodo. In 2015, Amazon tested a partnership with Wirecutter on a similar sponsored posts format on Amazon's site for recommendations.

Wirecutter has partnered with other websites including Engadget (as of 2015) to provide guest posts sponsored by the company. 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. To prevent bias, the staff who write its reviews are not informed about what commissions, if any, the site receives for different products. It earns most of its revenue from affiliate marketing by including links to its recommendations. The site focuses on writing detailed guides to different categories of consumer products which recommend just one or two best items in the category. These are the same gadgets I'd recommend to my friends and family, and these are the same gadgets I'd choose for myself. Most gadgets I choose here aren't the top of the line models that are loaded up with junk features or overpriced most of the ones we've picked are of the "good enough" or "great enough" variety, because this is generally where our needs and the right prices smash into each other. The choices I've made here took days of research and years of experience, interviews, data from the best editorial and user sources around. The point is to make it easier for you to buy some great gear quickly and get on with your life.

Wirecutter is mostly a list of amazing gadgets.
