Reporting on your own firing is an interesting experience. I’ve been a journalist for, god, like, twenty years at this point? This is a first. Not the first time I’ve written about an employer after we’ve broken up, or while we were together even—no, my social media footprint, and that one time I had to explain to a joyless HR rep what “glup shitto” meant can attest to both of those. Every other time it’s been on my own terms more or less, or at least it hasn’t been the kind of news that gets reported in outlets I read. There was some kind of AI-generated article about me leaving WIRED a few years ago, but that doesn’t count.

So hey, what the fuck?

On Thursday morning, I got an auto-generated notification that the person managing my invoices had changed. I didn’t think much of it, I figured it was some internal change on which person is hitting “approved” on my invoices. Then I tried to message my editor’s boss and found that her account was deactivated. I’d been working with her because my editor was out on leave after having been struck by a bullet the week previous (long story, and yes, they fired him too). So, I checked the other slack channels, and found a message from her in the commerce newsroom channel laying it all out: Her and everyone else in the commerce/affiliate side of things at Fandom had been fired. I’m not going to say let go or laid off or any of the other euphemisms, they were fired. We were fired. Me and a handful of other freelancers are free to pitch other sections but the commerce/product/affiliate section we wrote for is gone and all the staff with it.

Given Fandom’s track record I can’t say it’s really surprising they’d gut—what is at most publications—a big part of the overall revenue strategy. Fandom, to its credit, is an innovator when it comes to creative self-immolation. They doused themselves in gasoline, lit a cigarette, and fired the bystanders for doing this awful thing to them.

How your favorite website makes money

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a little primer on commerce and affiliate revenue. You know those buy links on product reviews, buying guides, gift guides, deal articles, that kind of thing? Every time you click one and buy something from whichever retailer it links you to (let’s be honest, it’s mostly Amazon), the publication gets a cut of that sale. The percentage varies from retailer to retailer, from publication to publication, all those things are negotiated between the business people at any given publisher. It’s not usually a big percentage, and only a small percentage of readers will click through and buy something, but those numbers add up over time.

That’s the whole game with affiliate revenue. Taking content out of the equation for a minute: Affiliate revenue is a numbers game. Small percentages of small percentages compounding across multiple articles and time periods. Done right, done well, a single buying guide (also called an evergreen article) can make anywhere from $10,000 to upwards of $80,000 in a 12-month period at a decent-sized publication. On the scale of multi-million dollar publications that’s not much, right? Per article, sure, yeah. But even a modest sized publication will have dozens of evergreens, hundreds of reviews, thousands of deal posts and gift guides. And they keep earning.

So a single evergreen updated four times a year can reasonably make $50,000-ish in that year. Multiply that times 24 and you have $1.2M. These are all ballpark figures, actual numbers are typically lower and higher, I’m just using medians to make a point here: Affiliate revenue can and should make a big publication like Gamespot an absolute motherfuck-ton of money. Millions, easy.

Let’s look at an example. A single evergreen article I managed at WIRED typically earned about $75K a year in commissions. Think about what WIRED typically covers. Consumer tech, TVs, headphones, cell phones, game consoles, computers, laptops, security, all that. Those are probably the main line coverage areas for WIRED. The areas that most people would associate with the brand. Those are the highest traffic areas, the categories that WIRED ranks highest in on Google search. That one article I mentioned? It was about coffee grinders. It was a subcategory of a subcategory and not at all a mainline vertical for WIRED as a publication and it still earned, what was at Fandom, an editor’s salary every year.

Machine gods old and new

While I was there, WIRED had maybe a dozen writers and a couple editors on the commerce team. Each of us, again ballpark, had at least a dozen evergreens we’d each maintain. The math does itself. A well-run commerce operation can make enough money to fund every writer’s salary on every section and desk publication-wide, and still produce authoritative reporting, rigorous testing, and voicey articles written with personality. This is a thing the MBA class cannot seem to grasp. If a reader trusts you, they might click a link and buy something you recommend. But that trust is fragile.

You know who agrees? Google. The machine god that decides which publications will succeed and fail has had a very simple mandate since the very beginning: Help people find stuff. That’s it, that’s all. That’s the whole thing. Every time there’s been an algorithm change that absolutely craters search traffic to a publication, there’s a reason. And let me tell you another secret: It’s never because your site’s articles need more keywords stuffed in the first paragraph. If an SEO consulting firm tries to sell you that, they’re fucking you (and they’re wrong).

Google, for all its many, many faults (and its role in devouring my industry and many others whole to feed its even newer machine god, Gemini), is an extremely transparent entity in this regard. Every time it changes its algorithm and sends your SEO consultants into apoplectic fits, there’s no mystery to it. There’s always a little note Google sends out. Here’s what we’re changing, here’s how it might affect you, here’s how to fix what we don’t like.

Guess what the most recent one was all about? Yep. De-ranking commerce/affiliate articles that appear to be slop and/or exist solely to make affiliate revenue and not serve its existing audience. Who the fuck reads CNN for advice on toasters? Exactly. So, how do you make sure your content doesn’t get de-ranked? Make it clear that you did hands-on testing, demonstrate expertise, sound like a human being. Yeah, all the things a well-run commerce operation would have been doing if not for business-side stakeholders telling them to do the exact opposite.

Horse-beating and stone-squeezing

The problem, even at WIRED (and its parent company Conde Nast) is the business-side stakeholders—actually let’s pause a second.

I hate that word. Stakeholders. They don’t have any stake in anything. Their jobs are never at risk when the line doesn’t go up enough in a fiscal quarter. They keep their jobs, they get shuffled around, their salaries increase year-after-year until they finally leave and end up in a higher paying position at a more prestigious company and on and on until their kids graduate from their elite boarding schools, go off to ivy-league colleges find out their parents were in the Epstein files and never talk to them again. (I bet that second home in the South-of-France was worth it though.)

Back to Conde Nast and the stakeholders who don’t actually have a stake in anything. The problem is, at every publication, the business-side people see commerce/affiliate revenue and want to squeeze all the blood out of that stone. And they will. They squeeze and squeeze and issue directives to the writing staff that they need to write more and sell more and fuck your ethics, fuck testing products, just quote Amazon reviews readers are idiots they don’t know any better. And then the writers do as they’re told and revenue plummets and Google search ranking takes a screaming nose dive off a cliff, and guess what happens next? The stakeholders lose their jobs for making the whole thing crash and burn right?

No of course not, they went to business school, and business school says if the line doesn’t go up you need grab a chainsaw and go to town. So they do. Writers and editors get fired. Sections get “restructured” to maximize revenue, and—seeing this happen so many times over the years was at first infuriating, then absurd, then just kind of concerning. Are the business people okay?

Short answer: No

I’ve never met an executive who wasn’t absolutely brilliant at taking something that worked well and just throwing the whole thing into the fucking fire and blaming someone else. That’s the real thing they teach in MBA programs. Here’s how you make a spreadsheet, and here’s how to make money and never get fired and fuck everyone else. I’d honestly have at least some respect for them if they’d ever just say that.

It’s the lying that really gets to me. I’d rather a cruel truth than a comforting lie. Journalism is a trade that teaches you how to spot bullshit. How to find the truth at the heart of a lie. So the mealymouthed “restructuring” “better for the company” “hard decision that had to be made” chingadera has never worked for me and just pisses me off. (Clearly. No way this screed ends up less than 2,000 words.)

If the Fandom execs who made the decision to cut the entire affiliate team just popped into Slack one day and laid it all out like “Hey so, I’m going to fire all of you because it will make me look better and keep me in my job, and buy me a new Cyber Truck. Hope that’s okay–actually I don’t. I kind of don’t care at all, because you’re not really people to me? I figured I’d be honest with you just to feel something for once in my life. And the thrill is making me a little hard. Anyway, get the fuck out of here.” Then I could at least say they treated us with some respect.

Instead it’s always couched in legally defensible language that never says quite enough but somehow says just enough to send you and your coworkers to the unemployment line together. Unless you’re a contractor then you’re well and truly fucked. Sometimes you’re allowed to beg for work from other parts of the publication at least. But sorry budgets are tight right now because of the restructuring so we can’t really pay you what we should, lo siento muchacha.

For the love of fans

Which brings us back to the beginning. I’m fired and not fired. The budget for my work on a week-to-week basis is gone with all the people who would’ve approved my invoices. Technically I can pitch other desks at Gamespot but that was always true. So, I’m not sure what’s next for me.

I’ll probably do what I always do in this situation: update my resume and start applying for positions a thousand of my colleagues are also applying for and restart the cycle anew. You get in the door, you build the machine that makes money and provides value to readers until a Patrick (or Patricia) Bateman thinks they can squeeze an extra few dollars out of your team by burning the reader trust you spent months or years earning. You can fight it, sometimes for years, but eventually they will crush the fight out of you, and kill everything you loved about your job. Again.

I suppose I could always go back to sex work? Maybe that’s the cruel truth inside this comforting lie—that my body has always been more valuable than my words.