“ More troublingly, some reporters at The Points Guy, which also covers the travel industry in general (it has been a comprehensive source for information on where vaccinated Americans can travel), have complained that the new owners have eroded the already rickety wall between the site’s service journalism and the credit card sales that fund it.
Red Ventures is “all about profit maximization,” said JT Genter, who left the site more than a year ago. He and other Points Guy writers said they hadn’t been pushed to publish stories they found dubious — indeed, the site has occasionally offered carefully critical coverage of Chase and American Express, its dominant business partners.”
Ever credit card affiliate is kind of a bad resource, card issuer compliance makes sure of this, even if the site tries to maintain ethics as a publisher.
It's fairly standard practice that issuers will remove some cards from the affiliate channel (Chase Slate was the prime example of this last I was active in the space.) Once a card is out of the channel, a publisher may need to scrub all mentions of that card off their site completely to stay compliant.
So in my last hands on example - even through the Chase Slate was arguably one of the best balance transfer card options at the time, we literally had to pretend like it didn't exist, or risk all other commissions from other active Chase cards.
There's no way to actually be honest and stay within their terms at the same time - all language is reviewed and picked apart by lawyers, which is why you'll see the same exact 'marketing bullets' across cc review sites. (Amex was the worst - can't say 'grocery store', have to say "US supermarket" type nonsense.)
I assume almost all information outside of forums with high barriers to entry are being gamed by marketing, and I assume as days go on, more and more forums will succumb.
The rapid access to high signal to noise ratio information was nice while it lasted.
Why just that one? The thing is the vast (vast, vast) majority of blogs are all about profit maximization. I view reading any of this rubbish as simply advertainment and refrain from it. At least they're honest about it. Hell the New York Times engages in this and pretends it's just a newpaper - it's called the Best Seller list.
Red Ventures is “all about profit maximization,” said JT Genter, who left the site more than a year ago. He and other Points Guy writers said they hadn’t been pushed to publish stories they found dubious — indeed, the site has occasionally offered carefully critical coverage of Chase and American Express, its dominant business partners.”
Well there goes that resource for me.