When I founded The Curated Weekly in 2024, the founding choice that has defined this publication was the choice not to take any compensation from any company whose products we cover. No advertising. No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No review-unit donations. Most of the founding decisions involve some balance of competing concerns; this one did not. It was the easiest call I have ever made, and after eighteen months of operating under the model, I am more convinced it was right than I was when I made it.
This piece is an editorial explanation of why.
The structural argument
Most consumer journalism in the United States today is paid for by the companies whose products are being reviewed. The mechanisms vary — banner advertising, native advertising, affiliate revenue, sponsored content, review-unit donations, paid press trips — but the underlying transaction is the same: the publication makes its money based on what the reader does after reading the review. If the reader buys the product, the publication gets a commission. If the reader doesn’t, the publication doesn’t.
This arrangement does not require any individual journalist to be dishonest, and most of the journalists I know at affiliate-funded publications are personally honest. The arrangement does, however, shape what gets written and what doesn’t, what gets featured and what doesn’t, and what gets reviewed at all. A publication funded by retail-purchase commissions has structural reasons to write about products that are likely to convert into purchases. A publication funded by sponsored content has structural reasons to feature the sponsors. A publication funded by review-unit donations has structural reasons to maintain access to the manufacturers who provide the units.
The structural reasons do not require explicit pressure from any commercial party. They show up as choices about what is worth covering, what stories survive editing, and what conclusions get framed in which way. Over years, the cumulative effect of these structural pressures is a consumer-information environment that systematically over-represents the products of the largest manufacturers, the products with the highest commission rates, and the products whose makers are most willing to provide review access.
The reader who is trying to use this environment to make a buying decision is, in effect, asked to model the incentive structure of the publication to figure out what to take seriously. Most readers should not have to do that. Most readers do not in fact do it; they read the review at face value. The publication that has been honest with itself about the limits of that face value will at least minimize the gap, and the publication that has not been honest with itself about it will keep widening the gap.
The personal argument
I spent fourteen years writing for affiliate-funded publications before founding this one. I was, I believe, an honest journalist within those structures; I wrote what I thought; I disagreed with editors when I thought they were wrong; I declined to write the puff pieces I was occasionally assigned. The work I did at those publications was good work.
The work was also, in retrospect, shaped in ways I did not fully see at the time. Stories I might have written did not get assigned, because they were not in the categories the affiliate revenue rewarded. Stories I did write got framed slightly differently than they would have been at a publication without the same structural pressures — not because anyone forced me to frame them that way, but because the editorial conversation around them was conducted in the language of conversion rates and product-link click-throughs.
When I started thinking about founding a publication of my own, the question I kept arriving at was: what would consumer journalism look like if the structural pressures of affiliate funding were not in the room? I do not know the full answer to that question; we are eighteen months into figuring out what the answer is in practice. I know that the practice of writing about products without thinking about retail-purchase conversion has been the most cognitively clean experience I have had in journalism since my first newspaper job, two decades ago.
What we lose
I do not want to pretend the choice is costless. Operating without advertising and affiliate revenue means The Curated Weekly is a smaller publication than it could have been with the conventional revenue model. We cover fewer beats, employ fewer journalists, produce a smaller weekly output. Subscription revenue and the founding capital of the staff have to do all of the work that affiliate revenue does at our peers, and there is just less of it.
The other thing we lose is a certain kind of access. Manufacturers know which publications they should be sending review units to and which ones can credibly demand pre-launch briefings. We are not on those lists. We get to products on the same retail timeline as any other consumer, which can be as much as six weeks after the largest publications have already published their first reviews.
These costs are real. They are also, in our judgment, smaller than the cost of taking the compensation. The reader who picks up The Curated Weekly should not have to model our incentive structure to figure out what to take seriously, because there is no incentive structure in the room. That clarity is worth the smaller scale.
Why this matters
The consumer-news beat in 2026 is in worse condition than it has been at any point in my career. Many of the publications I read and learned from in the 2010s have been hollowed out by parent-company restructurings, sold to private-equity firms whose thesis was advertising-revenue extraction, and converted into thin wrappers around affiliate-link aggregation. The depth of original reporting on the products that shape consumer life has declined; the volume of word-count has actually increased, but most of it now comes from publications that are paid by the products’ makers in one form or another.
Building a small publication that does not take that compensation feels, in this environment, like a public service in a small way. It is not the only model that produces good journalism — many of the publications I criticized above continue to produce good work despite their structural pressures — but it is a model whose absence from the consumer beat had become noticeable enough that we wanted to fill the gap.
We will keep filling it as long as readers find the work useful enough to fund. The model is not for everyone, and the publication is not for everyone. For readers who want consumer journalism written by named human journalists with no commercial incentive to flatter any particular product, this is what we are trying to provide.
The choice is harder than it sounds. The work is more interesting than it sounds. We will keep at it.
— Catherine Briggs, Editor-in-Chief