Category: In the News

Vice’s new affiliate vertical is called Rec Room, named jointly for its product recommendations content and after a “groovy 1970s basement,” according to Vice Media’s chief digital officer Cory Haik. The team consists of four staffers, including the director of affiliate Hilary Pollack, all of whom come from editorial backgrounds. But because they are not housed within the editorial team, they occupy non-union roles.

“This is new territory for everybody,” said Haik. “We want our relationship to be strong [with the union]. I think the most important thing here is that we’re trying to pay attention to the audience and our teams on the ground.”

But it is still important for the commerce team to have editorial instincts and insights into what the edit team is working on, Haik said. Pollack, along with all of the edit teams, reports to the vp of entertainment Stephanie Clary.

“I want [editorial and commerce] to feel connected, obviously, but their goals are revenue, ultimately. Keeping that clean is important,” said Haik.

Publishers’ strategies vary on where they put their revenue-driving, affiliate teams in their broader company hierarchy. For example, Trusted Media Brands, which publishes Reader’s Digest and The Family Handyman, recently moved its commerce team under the editorial side of the business.

But that’s not to say that the two divisions should operate completely independently of each other either, like how the advertising and editorial teams have remained separate for so long, said Susan McGregor, associate research scholar at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.

To produce commerce content that actually performs, there needs to be a sense of journalistic trust and narrative storytelling, McGregor added, which is why she said it makes sense for Vice to tap former journalists for the commerce positions.

Ultimately, a reader won’t know or care where the commerce team sits in a company, McGregor said, but whatever umbrella it is put under, the content should be written honestly. “Readers pick up on whether you’re being honest and independent or whether you’re trying to push something,” she said.

Vice has spent the past six months experimenting with its affiliate content. Haik pointed to the success of a post from March 24 called “Love Weed, Hate the Scaries? This Legal Bud Promises the Mellowest Buzz Ever” that linked to an independent CBD company called Dad Grass. The post made more than 600 sales for the company with a conversion rate of 9%. That post alone more than doubled the early revenue goals Vice had since January, she said.

Haik would not disclose hard revenue goals for the commerce team but said that after this “foundational year,” she expects Vice will follow a similar pattern to Refinery29, doubling its revenue in the second year and then exponentially beyond that. Currently, Refinery29 makes about the same amount of money from its affiliate business as it does from its traveling event franchise 29Rooms, she said, but would not share exact percentages.

Refinery29 spent the past three years honing its e-commerce strategy, which was one of the capabilities that Haik said was overtly appealing to Vice when making the acquisition, outside of its audience cohort.

The site doesn’t have a hard stance against using Amazon links — a popular option for publishers given the platform’s popularity among consumers, but Haik said the publisher will emphasize indie brands that feel bespoke to Vice’s coverage of the classically taboo topics of “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.” Vice will also focus on curating recommendations for specific micro-communities within its audience as those groups tend to spend money based on their passions, she added.

“We don’t want to just start putting buy buttons on everything at Vice. Our picks will help you live better, feel better, look better, cook better and even have better sex,” Haik said.

Google said it will prioritize product reviews that feature information gathered through hands-on evaluation of the product, rather than aggregated information about it. The move stands to hurt publishers, especially those that have found success in aggregating product reviews.

The key details

• Specifically, reviews that “express expert knowledge” about the products being discussed, or show what a product is like physically “with unique content beyond what is provided by the manufacturer” will fare better.
• Content that compares products to one another will also benefit; Google’s update asks site owners to consider whether their reviews “provide quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance.”
• The change will only affect product reviews written in English. Google said the changes will take two weeks to take effect.

Separating wheat from chaff

Google has always said that changes to search are made to serve users’ interests, and it’s easy to see how this update aligns with that mission. The commerce content space has grown more crowded in recent years, as brands and retailers have grown more interested in affiliate marketing and publishers have chased those commissions. Last year’s pandemic accelerated that trend, as advertisers spent media dollars cautiously but invested in affiliate marketing.

“Honestly, a lot of [commerce content] out there has gotten kind of shitty,” said an executive at one publisher with a large commerce operation, who asked not to be identified while discussing changes Google has made. “There’s a lot out there now that feels very pay for play.”

Privileging content built from hands-on testing and evaluation, rather than content built by collecting and summarizing Amazon customer reviews, makes sense from that perspective. 

But it will also make commerce content more time- and resource-intensive to produce, said executives at several publishers with commerce content operations, so much so that it could make expanding into new product categories prohibitively expensive; well-researched, in-depth product reviews “are a hard operation to scale,” a source at a second publisher said.

Shaping a shopping ecosystem

The push toward original reporting serves Google in other ways too. Like most platforms, Google is trying to figure out how to play the biggest possible role in consumers’ e-commerce behavior. Creating an environment filled with hands-on reviews produced by experts could help distinguish Google from Amazon, where most American consumers begin most of their product searches; a survey conducted in August 2020 by Dynata found that 53% of American adults begin their product searches on Amazon.

While Amazon has been experimenting with how to incorporate publisher recommendations into its platform, its owned and operated properties are also growing increasingly crowded with ads.

Google’s past tweaks have had significant effects on different sides of publishers’ commerce operations. In late 2019, Google cut off a once-promising coupons revenue stream when it changed the way it treated content hosted on publisher sub-domains. That same year, publishers fumed when Google started scraping endorsements out of publisher buying guides and incorporating them into Google Shopping widgets displayed in search results, essentially stealing publishers’ insights and using them to drive sales that publishers wouldn’t get compensated for. 

Fears of a similar development remain on publishers’ minds. Late last month, Google launched a Best Products for Everything widget on its Google Shopping homepage, featuring curated collections of products across dozens of categories. The product-level pages inside that widget still feature excerpts from publishers’ guides.