January 1, 2025
Building and maintaining trust with you, our audience, is our top priority. Over the last five years, we have developed over 300 thousand subscribers on YouTube (with over 50 million views to date), a very (very) large number of subscribers on our newsletter email list, and thousands more on other social media platforms. We did this by working hard to provide the best, unbiased content and avoiding the “me too” posts, when possible.
Through these different platforms, we often recommend products or services without any business relationship, simply because we believe our viewers will benefit. These companies don’t pay us to recommend them (and in most cases they don’t actually know we recommended them).
We are approached (conservatively) over 100 times per year by different companies asking us to “pitch their product,” to our viewers. Overwhelmingly, we just say, “No, thank you,” and move on. (Note to companies looking for affiliates: telling us we’re wrong about what our audience will like, asking us to “just get on the phone for 5 minutes” after we’ve said no, or “bumping yourself to the top of our email” by forwarding the same email to us every single day for weeks on end puts you on the permanent blacklist – particularly if your final “goodbye” email ends with an insult. This is a reasonably small community, and we all share notes…)
Occasionally, we will support a company that has a proven product, great reputation, and an excellent fit with our audience through an affiliate or sponsorship relationship. To date, we have three of these relationships, and each has gone through significant vetting.
How We Vet a Possible Affiliate or Sponsor Relationship
First and foremost, we ask ourselves: Would we recommend this product to our parents, best friend, or life partner? If the answer is “no,” then we don’t go any further. A current example is cryptocurrency. I’m sure there are some highly ethical, well-run cryptocurrency exchanges out there, but if my Dad came to me and said, “This crypto thing is going through the roof, and I want a piece. Where should I go to invest?” I would do everything in my power to talk him out of it. However, if he came to me and said, “I want to get more involved with my finances. Where can I go to learn more, track the important things and prepare for the future?” I’d know the exact personal financial planning software to recommend to him, because I use it myself. Both avenues involve investing, but the first “screams” danger while the second “whispers” financial prudence. You get the point…
The next step, for more expensive products, is that we check the Better Business Bureau rating. (If they don’t have an A+ rating, we need to know why before we proceed. Amazon, for example, has an A rating, not A+, but when you sell to millions of people a day, complaints will happen – that makes sense to us). Some companies have a BBB rating, and some don’t. Of those that do we read the comments for themes and context.
We then compare features with competitors, check how long they’ve been in business, do a thorough search for negative press, and for some products and services, we’ve interviewed management. If available, we check their rating agency credit reports and analyst reports on the company if they are publicly traded. If warranted, we’ll also ask our subscribers on YouTube what they think and even ask them to vote. They are not shy about feedback and we often get dozens of written responses and thousands of votes.
Finally, in most cases we have tested the product or service thoroughly ourselves. The reason I say “in most cases,” is that sometimes it’s not possible. For example, a Medigap company may have a great product, but since no one here is age 65 (but close!), we can’t personally attest to the claims paying history.
While this level of diligence doesn’t guarantee success, it greatly increases the odds. In short, we do more work than 99.9% of the company’s customers would ever do before we agree to an affiliate or sponsor relationship – we have the luxury of saying “no” and it not affecting our bottom line.
Thank you for putting your trust in us, we’ll continue to work hard to earn it every single day.
Geoff Schmidt