What Happened to <em>Wirecutter</em>?
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Joe Casabona’s love affair with Wirecutter began in 2013, when the site recommended a pair of inductive winter gloves—the kind that let you interact with a touch screen while staying toasty. They worked well, so he kept going back; he appreciated the rigor of the site’s product reviews. An exhaustive, nearly comical amount of research went into every category: Toilet-paper recommendations were backed by 50 hours of testing. The reviewers were bona fide subject-matter experts or enterprising obsessives who approached finding the best dishwasher with the fervor of crime-scene investigators. This work was documented in the form of sprawling posts, many the length of a magazine feature. Casabona, an audio-gear specialist, remembers thinking he’d found his people. “I really felt I could trust them,” he told me, “and Wirecutter became my go-to.”
I have a similar story, and you might also. It’s why has evolved from a niche website into a cultural phenomenon over its 12 years. (It’s also why you’ll find the same stuff in so many Millennial kitchens.) helped popularize a genre of lucrative recommendation content—where the site gets a cut of every purchase you make after you click on “affiliate” links to Amazon or other partner, there’s a good chance that ’s DNA was in almost every single article you found.
