This article from simplyrecipes.com just popped up on my Apple News feed. Yeah, I fell for it and had to see what their choice was….The Best Store Bought BBQ Sauce, as chosen by 3 Pitmasters. When you see who one of their 3 “panel of BBQ Connoisseurs” was…..oh gee, not biased at all! 🙄 The other 2 were probably relatives of his. Unbelievable!
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yeah, that's an ad in disguise... and a dollar store disguise at that -
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The founder of Lillie's BBQ sauce just raves about it.
Wow, that is an endorsement if I ever heard one. 👩🍳 Where can I run out and get some?
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Wow, I wasn't expecting it to be that blatant! That's an ad.
What is so troubling is that the author appears to be a real person and is an experienced food journalist.
The article uncomfortably reminds me of some stuff I wrote in the mid-1990s, when I was trying to give computer journalism a go. Freelancing is not lucrative; I found myself trying to write anything about computers and some of my stuff did very much blur the lines between journalism and writing ad copy.
Although, I can't explain the list of related articles at the bottom. This seems to be a template sort of thing for them.
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HilariousComment
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Wow, that is even more ridiculous than your polls
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1. If you see the word Best in the title of any article or ad it IS clickbait.
2. If a title started with the word Top followed by any number it IS clickbait.
The exceptions to the above rules are so few that they should also never be clicked on.Comment
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Exception: Top 10 Best places for BBQ in the South
https://youtu.be/MuqfSrlsAGI?si=JoNX3KjbV3_vCyQiLast edited by 58limited; July 4, 2025, 12:31 PM.Comment
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Or on Pinterest…. I made “enter dish title here” and my husband can’t stop raving about it….Comment
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Panhead John. Everything that person cooks they eat every day. Seen some of their videos but ignore now.
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This entire thing reminds of something I experienced that was incredibly prescient.
As I mentioned above, I tried giving computer journalism a go. It was 1995 and I had just changed my major to journalism. In my first course, we had a guest panel from the Houston Chronicle.
The Chronicle's website had just gone live a few months prior (again, this was 1995) and the panel included an editor, a reporter, a copywriter, and a headline writer. They all talked about how online journalism was and would be different from traditional print.
I remember distinctly the headline writer discussing how they had a new metric....their job performance now included clicks, which was something impossible in print. He made this fascinating distinction: In print, the job of the headline writer is to get the reader to read the article; online the job of the headline writer is to sell the article to the reader. (In print you just have to move the eyes....online it takes that extra oomph of moving a hand on the mouse and clicking a button.)
It's thirty years later. I think he was right.
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I watched a video the other day from Linus Tech Tips where he explained about how these companies make money with these sites. I've always wondered - it's incredible.
I think they're called "listicles" - i.e., an article that is just a list, with affiliate links to the items with the highest affiliate commissions. These companies buy up websites with a known following, then turn them into 'listicle' shills and rake in commission until the website essentially dies and move on to another.
Sadly, there are a vast VAST number of uninformed consumers who don't know how to do real research who buy after checking these sites, thinking they're 'real' reviews.
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Yeah, reviews in the form of lists with links that gain commission. That's it. -
The word review is now meaningless on the search engines. Either the results are sites discreetly owned by the advertisers, directly paid by advertisers for positive reviews, or more generally a site that gets a commission for a referral; a system which was pioneered by Amazon and has basically destroyed the validity of online reviews. You might luck onto a real old style site that does honest reviews occasionally, but you really had to go deep in the results. -
Donw sadly even the REAL reviewers are now under attack. In that same video by Linus Tech Tips, it detailed how an honest reviewer of air filters was sucked into a media/advertising war and threatened with lawsuits and nearly put out of business for simply pointing out absolute FACTS about the filter they were reviewing - namely that the exact. same. device. was available under a different name on Alibaba for a tiny fraction of the cost. It was truly disheartening.
Fecking internet.
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How truthful do you feel Consumer Reports is? I’ve still used them a couple of times lately.Comment
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Personally I think they are very good. Independently purchases each item, independently tests each item, and then writes their reviews based on a consensus of their testers. They get their money only from their subscribers.
That has been their business model from the start, and if they changed or cheated, they literally would be throwing away a model that has worked and profited them for decades and decades.
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I’ve been a subscriber for many many years now. I agree with y’all. But, I also will sometimes read other reviews along with CR’s comments about the product. I’m pretty good at weeding out the “goofball” reviewers online.
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